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STELLIGEEI 

AND 

OTHER ESSAYS CONCERNING 

AMERICA 



IN UNIFORM BINDING. 



ANDREW LANG. 

Letters to Dead Authors, - - - $1 00 

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL. 

Obiter Dicta — First Series, - - 1 00 
Obiter Dicta — Second Series, - - 1 00 

W. E. HENLEY. 

Views and Reviews — Literature, - 1 00 

BARRETT WENDELL. 

Stelligeri and other Essays, - - 1 25 



STELLIGERI 



OTHER ESSAYS 



CONCERNING 



AMERICA 



BARRETT WENDELL 



[**0CT 19 1893.) 



NEW YORK Lj £ y? U y 



CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1893 



Copyright, 1893, by 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 

/- j^«..v4 5 6 5 &j 



7* 



TROW DIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



IN 
STELLIGERORUM 

/Ifcemorfam 

They came in youthful ardour here, where we 
Follow their footsteps. Here like us they played 
And worked ; like us had follies, that dismayed 

Their shaven elders. Hence exultantly 

Like us they encountered life, eager to see 
Its prizes theirs. Unperfect, "brave, they made 
Our poor world better. Like them, unafraid, 

May we at last merge in eternity. 

From out their old New England, still pure 
Of foreign taint, where in their dreamy past 
They stand heroic, comes the courage now 
That nerves us for the conflict we must know. 
What nobler prize for who the trial endure 
Than place in their companionship at last ? 

Harvard College, 1893 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I. Stelligeri 1 

II. The Four American Centuries . . 21 

III. Some Neglected Characteristics of 

the New England Puritans . . 45 

IV. Were the Salem Witches Guiltless ? 63 
V. American Literature . . . .91 

VI. John Greenleaf Whittier . . . 147 
VII. Mr. Lowell as a Teacher . . . 203 



I 

STELLIGEEI 



STELLIGEEI 



A few years ago the authorities of Harvard 
University made in their quinquennial catalogue 
a change which has generally commended itself 
to modern good sense. For the first time they 
wrote it in English. Changes in this catalogue 
have quite as much precedent as uniformity. 
Only ten years before, the quinquennial catalogue 
had been a triennial. And they say that no two 
numbers had ever possessed quite the same 
characteristics of form and arrangement. But un- 
til 1890, all these official lists of those whom Har- 
vard College — or Harvard University, as nowadays 
they prefer to call it — had educated or honoured, 
had in common one trait that is now definitely a 
thing of the past. They w T ere written, from be- 
ginning to end, in something that passed for 
Latin. 

No doubt there was obvious absurdity in offi- 
cially naming an every-day Yankee Johannes or 
Jacobus ; or in translating such abnormal Chris- 
tian names as that of Increase Mather into bar- 
barous terms like Crescentius. The absurdity of 



4 STELLIGEEI 

similarly Latinizing surnames — an absurdity dis- 
carded ever so many years ago — was no greater. 
No doubt, equally, the long strings of incompre- 
hensible Latin abbreviations which used to follow 
the names of distinguished alumni were very 
ridiculous. But to many of us the absurdity 
seemed lovably harmless ; and with it went one 
or two phrases that some of us are sorry to lose. 

Chief among these, perhaps, was the sonorous 
little sentence that used to close the numerical 
summary of Harvard men. The total number was 
given first ; then, formally subtracted from it, 
came the number of the dead. In the class lists 
" the names of the dead were prefixed by asterisks. 
In the final summary, the number of the dead 
was defined thus : E vivis cesserunt stelligeri. — 
They that bear the stars have passed from among the 
living. One did not read the sentence often. Some 
of us looked at it so seldom that I have heard it 
honestly misquoted in a far more dogmatic form : 
Ex his stelligeri in cwlum processerunt. — Of these 
they that tear the stars have passed forth into the 
heavens. Stelligeri was the fatal word. To all of 
us who cared for the old catalogues, the dead men 
of Harvard were always stelligeri — they that hear the 
stars. And some of us had a sentimental way of 
looking at the skies of a clear night, with a half- 
phrased feeling that their faint, twinkling, lasting 
glory had something to do with our college mates 
who were gone before us. For did not the cata- 



STELLIGEEI 5 

logue say so ? It was a pleasantly childish fancy 
which made those who yielded to it sometimes 
feel more akin than usual to the old worlds of 
youthful humanity which the colleges and univer- 
sities once kept so much in mind. I have not 
had the heart to look for what our dead men 
are called now — "deceased," perhaps, or "no 
longer living." * At all events, they are no longer 
stelligeHj — which I am informed, by the way, was 
never classical Latin. 

The change came none too soon. Harvard 
College, to be sure, has always been true to what 
remains its oldest and strongest tradition — that 
every man and every generation has an inalien- 
able right to think. Thereby the men and the 
generations make their conclusions — no matter 
how orthodox — impregnably their own . The deep 
conservatism which has preserved this heretical 
tradition for above two centuries has resulted in 
a good many superficial changes meanwhile. The 
first conclusion arrived at by people who do their 
own thinking is generally that their immediate 
predecessors have been seriously mistaken. And 
the Harvard of one generation has almost always 
been a perceptibly different place from the Har- 
vard of the next. The unparalleled growth of 
the college during the past twenty years, however, 
has made the most marked change in its history. 

* Since writing this I have looked, and find them " Re- 
ported as deceased." 



6 STELLIGEKI 

The old graduates — stelligeri — belonged to classes 
small enough and submitted to systems of instruc- 
tion similar enough to make them in a sense all 
friends, with a hundred traditions and memories in 
common. Nowadays, when every Freshman class 
is bigger than the whole college was fifty years ago, 
and when every man meets the elective system at 
the college threshold, everything is altered. One 
cannot say for the worse : most of us who know 
modern Harvard well think it a far better place 
than the old. But it is not the same. We have 
discarded no end of useless things and phrases ; 
we have introduced no end of useful ones ; we are 
striving to know and to preserve the truth with 
as much eagerness as any who have gone before. 
In every superficial way, though, our experience 
is utterly different from that of our elders. The 
authorities might have kept the old forms. They 
might have called us, in our time, stelligeri too. 
But we could never have been the real thing. 



II 



A typical evidence of what the real thing was 
lately came to me. A kinswoman on her death- 
bed sent me as a farewell greeting the record of 
his class which her father, dead these thirty years, 
had kept from admission to college until the end of 
his life. It is in a small, leather-bound note-book, 
with thick, old-fashioned leaves. It begins with 



STELLIGERI 7 

an alphabetic list of the class as they entered 
college. A series of simple hieroglyphics in- 
dicates 1 who attained the supreme glory of the 
Porcellian Club, who belonged to the Hasty 
Pudding, who to the Phi Beta Kappa, who 
dropped out of college, and so on. Then come 
pages of notes as to the professions the men 
took up, whom they married, how many children 
they had, and in general what became of them ; 
then pages into which are pasted clippings from 
the newspapers, generally eulogistic and frequent- 
ly obituary. The last bears a date forty-eight 
years after graduation, and only a few weeks before 
the faithful recorder died. He did not live to see 
his college jubilee. 

Provincial, even trivial, these records may seem. 
If I remember rightly, the most eminent of all the 
fifty or sixty men they concern was one who for a 
few years became a sober local dignitary. They 
tell little of character, anyway, beyond the fact 
that a rather surprising number of the class 
seem to have been afflicted with insanity or in- 
sane wives. In cold blood, one cannot call the 
little volume much more than a record of names 
and dates. And yet I have seen few books which 
affect me as less prosaic. These dry records were 
kept unremittingly for above half a century by a 
loyal Harvard man who longed to have always be- 
fore him every little fact that transpired about 
the college and the college men of his time. In 



8 STELLIGEEI 

substance, they were almost as formal as the firm, 
slow handwriting in which they were traced. In 
essence, one felt, every stroke of the fine pen was 
loving. 

The men these records concerned were almost 
all native Yankees of the old stock. In later life 
by far the greater part of them were honourable 
and useful citizens — divines, lawyers, physicians, 
merchants, teachers. It is some years now since 
the last survivor died. Every one, I think, was 
written down stelliger. 

There was little time to send an answer for this 
gift. Yet I tried more than once to phrase an 
answer that should tell all it meant. Finally, in 
despair of expressing the thing literally, I tried to 
make some verses ; that effort, it seemed, might 
tell more than any formal phrases of the emotion 
I had to convey. The verses, though rather lame 
and halting, served their purpose. My kins- 
woman sent back word that they were welcome. 
She had loved the old Harvard traditions, too. 
At her death, a few weeks later, it was reported 
that she had bequeathed to the college, in memory 
of her father, a small foundation for an annual 
lecture on the immortality of the soul. 



Ill 



The verses thus written I have used for the dedi- 
cation of this little book. That they were made 



STELLIGERI 9 

for so widely different a purpose is one reason 
why I have liked to use them here. The essays 
of which 1 the book is made were written indepen- 
dently, with no thought of collection, and little 
that they had anything in common. It was only 
when they were all done that I began to see how 
they belong together. 

The reminiscences of Mr. Lowell were written 
first. When he died, people did not half appre- 
ciate what his professional work as a teacher had 
been. So I wrote down what I remembered of it, 
as the best tribute I could pay his memory. At the 
time I did not sign it, because at such a moment 
the obtrusion of an unknown name seems to me 
impertinent. What any reader cared for was not 
who might have written this tribute, but what the 
tribute might add to those already paid the mem- 
ory of a man who had lived to be the unques- 
tioned head of American letters. That objection, 
I think, need not stand in my way now. In sub- 
stance, the paper belongs with the others ; and in 
a collection of one's own work, it would be silly to 
assume one's self unknown in such sense as must 
be the case when one's occasional writing chances 
to be accepted by an established magazine. 

The other papers in this book are all occasional, 
in the conventional sense of the word. They 
were written to be read or presented at formal 
meetings. In 1891 I was asked to tell the Ameri- 
can Historical Association as much as I could 



10 STELLIGERI 

read in twenty minutes of what I thought about 
the New England Puritans. A little later I was 
asked to address the meeting held by the Essex 
Institute, at Salem, in commemoration of the 
two hundredth anniversary of the issuing of war- 
rants against the witches. In the autumn of 
1892 I was asked to address the Public Schools 
of Worcester, on the four hundredth anniversary 
of the Discovery of America. A little later I was 
invited to give a formal lecture on American 
Literature at Vassar College. And when Mr. 
Whittier died, the American Academy of Arts and 
Sciences invited me to write the memoir of him 
for their Proceedings. 

Some such statement as this was almost neces- 
sary, to explain the differences of form and man- 
ner among these papers. One does not write for 
school children in quite the way that one falls 
into when addressing a learned society ; and one's 
personal reminiscences can hardly be phrased in 
such style as one unconsciously assumes when 
making a university lecture. These natural di- 
vergences of style and temper, then, made me at 
first think of these papers as separate things. 
Then, as I turned them over, I began to see that 
among them they had gone far to express, from 
different points of view, certain opinions about 
American life, past and present, that I was glad 
to have formulated. In collecting the papers, 
however, I was not sorry that their style is not 



STELLIGEEI 11 

uniform. Its very irregularity will go as far as 
anything can to disclaim the assumption, which 
always seems inherent in print, that one's views 
are final. What I have written here is only what 
I have grown to think during thirteen years of 
academic teaching — a mode of life dangerously 
remote from practical experience, but perhaps 
more favorable than that to observation. What I 
have said is shown, by its very diversity of form, 
to be only an expression of what an individual 
who has little to do with active life has come to 
think. 



IV 



In brief, it seems to me that the America of 
the past resembles, in more ways than one, the 
stelligeri of Harvard. It is a thing we shall not 
see again ; we love to think about it and to cherish 
its traditions ; and if we drop love — using our heads 
and not our hearts — we find it on scrutiny not 
altogether so imposing as we like to imagine it. 
For it was not divine but human; and the only 
thing that can make humanity godlike is unvio- 
lated tradition. 

In a certain sense, we may say that hitherto the 
history of America has been that of a great na- 
tional inexperience. This does not mean, of 
course, that human life has not existed here in 
all its real complexity. It means that hitherto 



12 STELLIGERI 

our communities have generally been so far from 
overcrowded, and our people so free to make their 
way whither they would and could, that in 
America the material problems of life have pre- 
sented themselves less regularly than in Europe. 
So hitherto we have been naturally disposed on 
the one hand to over-estimate small merit and 
petty success, and on the other to display our 
vices in forms which, however deplorable on a 
moral scale, still have in them something of 
youthful naughtiness as distinguished from ma- 
ture rascality. 

The race to which these generations of inex- 
perience were coming met them with a dogmatic 
creed actually based on such experience of human 
frailty and wickedness as must always be the lot 
of any dense society. Creeds long survive expe- 
rience. The dogmas of Calvinism were uttered 
for generations in communities where, in normal 
moods, they could not seem exhaustively true. 
A certain unconscious divergence between state- 
ments and facts followed, as a national character- 
istic. It grew until our freer minds flung the 
old dogmas away, trying to make new and better 
ones of their own. 

The new dogmas, which in brief rest on the as- 
sumption that human nature is perfectible, are a 
great deal more inspiring than the old that harp 
so on depravity. What is more, they are a good 
deal more true to the national inexperience of 



STELLIGERI 13 

America than were the old ones. But they have 
been utflered, and are uttered still, by the de- 
scendants and the heirs of a race that for genera- 
tions has been habituated to the most serious kind 
of assertion unchecked by reference to actual fact. 

On the optimism that underlies these new dog- 
mas is really based our tremendous national 
faith in democracy. If human nature is really 
perfectible, even though it never get to perfection, 
democracy can really solve the problems of life, 
when they come upon us in all their force, as 
they have never been solved before. But if 
human nature should after all prove damnable, 
democracy may turn out a less certain panacea 
than we have been accustomed to believe. 

Experience nowadays seems bound rapidly to 
supplant the national inexperience that has hith- 
erto been our most characteristic heritage. As ex- 
perience grows about us, there is reason to doubt 
whether the serenely optimistic dogmas of the last 
century or more are essentially so true as we have 
been taught at school. There are moments, in 
fact, when the gloomier dogmas that the Calvinist 
fathers brought from wicked, overcrowded Eng- 
land seem after all nearer the truth visible to our 
own eyes. And in that case democracy cannot 
seem as ultimate a solution of life as it used to. 
There are obvious aspects in which it is begin- 
ning to look terribly like the substitution of a 
myriad damnable tyrants for a few. 



14 STELLIGEKI 



So much, in one way or another, the papers in 
this little book will show. Coldly written down 
here, it looks disheartening, if not disloyal. Yet 
I do not think that it is really either. It is dis- 
heartening only if we are afraid to face a future 
of manly struggle instead of Utopian dreams. It 
is disloyal only in the sense in which a subject is 
disloyal who feels bound not to deny the sins and 
the vices of a sovereign he willingly serves. 

To any thoughtful man, I suppose, the evils 
and the dangers of his own time are often more 
apparent than its nobler traits. And, very surely, 
this is no depressing symptom. So long as evils 
and dangers are recognized, they will be met, at 
least, with effort. It is the hidden disease that 
works the worst havoc. And even when these evils 
and dangers seem to permeate a whole national 
system, there is no need to lose courage. Human 
institutions, like human beings, must have their 
faults and their weaknesses. They must be trans- 
itory. Even the great religions of the world are 
bound to change and to pass; much more, the 
political systems by which from time to time men 
submit to be governed. But through every change 
runs what after all is a steady purpose. Eeally, 
in its deepest heart, the human race is constantly 
struggling onward in a blind effort to be happier, 
wiser, better. 



STELLIGERI 15 

Any man or any generation can see only a mo- 
mentary fragment of this struggle. In that mo- 
ment, however, men can perceive the forces that 
they must meet and conquer if they are to leave 
their children a richer, wider heritage than they 
themselves received. To meet and to conquer 
these hostile forces they must yield themselves 
up to human leaders ; and these human leaders, 
being human, must be frail. Now it is a sovereign 
man whom the loyal are bound to follow, again a 
sovereign class, with us a sovereign people. And 
how hearty, for all our misgivings, is our real 
loyalty to our sovereign, we can all feel for our- 
selves when our blood tingles at the thought of 
submission to domination. We may lament as we 
please the follies and the errors of the thousand- 
headed populace who stand for us in the place 
traditionally held in history by consecrated sov- 
ereigns. But each of us would still rather live 
and die a citizen than even the proudest subject. 
Whoever does not feel this spirit in himself can- 
not know, in his inner heart, what the name 
American means. 



VI 



Theke are moments, however, when the sight 
of the great changes that are now coming upon 
us makes our hearts sink. If America in the fut- 
ure, we tell ourselves, were to be like America 



16 STELLIGEKI 

in the past, all would surely go well, as far as 
human foresight can reach. There is none of us, 
I believe, who would not willingly trust our fut- 
ure to such native guidance as has governed our 
past. But the floodgates are opened. Europe is 
emptying itself into our Eastern seaports ; Asia 
overflowing the barriers we have tried to erect on 
our Western coast ; Africa sapping our life to the 
southward. And meantime the New England 
country is depopulated, and the lowlands drained 
by the Mississippi are breeding swarms of dema- 
gogues. And so on, and so on, and so on. If 
the future were to be as the past, we say ! 

Well, how if it were ? Better still, how, after 
all, if perhaps it be ? In many ways it will inevi- 
tably differ. Its experience must be far sterner, 
far fiercer — in every way on a grander scale. 
But if the evils to meet be greater, may not 
greater virtues rise to meet them? For, after 
all, as we scrutinize this past, we cannot find 
the facts quite so splendid as the traditions. A 
little while ago we tried to sum up our impres- 
sions of what this real past was ; and we called it 
no better than two centuries or so of national in- 
experience, youthfully asserting human nature 
to be essentially better than scrutiny shows it to 
have been even on the spot where these cheerful 
generalizations were made. That the past was j 
not really all that we like to boast, is a fact that 
should give us courage. By the same token, it 



STELLIGERI 17 

may well be that the future shall not bring all 
that we dr\sad to fear. 

YII 

It is posterity, of course, that makes traditions. 
But it can make them only of the stuff it finds 
ready. The children in their youth know the 
fathers, in their age tell their own children what 
manner of men the fathers were. Untrue in a 
thousand details, then, traditions — like other 
ideals — are bound to rest on a basis of truth per- 
haps deeper than appears to one who coolly 
scrutinizes in all their living confusion the facts 
from which they rise. 

Petty we may find the realities of our actual past 
— sordid, inexperienced. But whatever these re- 
alities, we all know, and instinctively we all thrill 
with the knowledge, that from that past have 
come the traditions that have guided and that 
still guide our native national life. "What the 
reality was, after all, is not the chief question. 
More notable for us, a thousand times, is the 
ideal which that reality, with all its errors, has 
transmitted to posterity. For that ideal, that 
tradition — smile at its details as we may — is really 
noble. It is pure, simple, aspiring. In us all it 
has bred the deepest feeling that marks us as fel- 
low-countrymen. Let us be pure in heart, simple 
in life, aspiring in effort. Then so far as in us 
2 



18 STELLIGERI 

lies we may transmit to our children an enriched 
heritage of such tradition as the fathers have left 
us. Our faults, like theirs, shall fade and pass ; 
our memories shall merge with theirs in the 
dreamy past from whence shall come the inspira- 
tion that shall make greater than our own America 
the unseen America of the future. 

VIII 

It is easier to realize such sentiments as this in 
small instances than in large. We are right, then, 
in cherishing so dear]y our local traditions, our 
family pride. We are better men, I believe, and 
better citizens, for loving not only our country 
but our States, not only our States but our towns, 
not only our families but our colleges. And very 
surely there is for some of us no firmer warrant 
that the traditions we love shall live as long as 
our memory shall last than the warrant we find in 
remembering the stelligeri of Harvard. 

Their lives and their notions were often petty 
enough, limited, absurd to their children as the 
barbarous old Latin catalogues will probably 
seem to ours. There were plenty of weaklings 
among them, too, no doubt. Almost every class 
had its Tom who drank himself to death, or its 
Dick who was justly jailed, or its Harry who 
proved the most deplorable of husbands. Nor 
were these stelligeri, as a body men, of great dis- 



STELLIGEEI 19 

tinction. They number several thousands, and 
among them are not many dozens who, as the 
years begin to pass, can survive in human memory. 
Names and dates most of them must ultimately 
be. The rest oblivion. 

Yet whatever their personal traits, there has 
come from them to us who follow them a tradition 
of our own without which we, and our country, 
were poorer. Like the great traditions of Amer- 
ica, this little tradition of Harvard is pure, simple, 
aspiring, and lasting. And in it finally merge all 
the folly, the error, the weakness, the nonsense 
of the swiftly passing college generations that for 
two centuries and more have received and pre- 
served it. On the open books of the college 
shield is the single word, " Veritas" — " Truth" 
Keep truth in view, say the silent voices of them 
that bear the stars, and trust, like us, that all 
shall be well. 

In aspect, in thought, in phrase, in purpose, 
we of the present and the future differ more and 
rAore from them of .the past. That their names 
were preserved in pompous, barbarous Latin, and 
that ours shall be recorded in plain, every- day 
English, typifies the difference with a truth that 
makes the very change a preservation of the 
deepest tradition of Harvard. But in spirit, if we 
be loyal, we may be at one with them. And so 
far as our parts may go to preserve for America 
what is best, to discard what is evil, to fight our 



20 STELLIGEKI 

fight bravely, and at last to go without misgiving 
to our rest, our way is plain before us. For we 
have only to follow the footsteps of them that 
bear the stars. 



II 

THE FOUB AMEEICAN 
CENTIIEIES 



(An Address before the Public Schools of Worcester, 
Massachusetts, on Columbus Day, October 21, 1892.) 



THE FOUE AMEEICAN 
CENTUKIES 



Among the most interesting books of the past 
year is Mr. John Fiske's " Discovery of America." 
It is a history of that fascinating kind which tells 
us, to be sure, little that was not known before- 
hand ; but that shows us, so simply that we 
hardly realize we are being taught, where each 
scattered bit of knowledge belongs. Careful 
students of one period or another may find in 
Mr. Fiske's work errors of detail : to write so com- 
prehensive a book without minor errors were al- 
most to transcend human frailty. But no one, I 
think, can read the book without a fresh and a 
lasting appreciation of that great process of 
human development whose most significant mo- 
ment we celebrate to-day. 

For, after all, the moment when Columbus set 
foot on the unknown land which marked the limit 
of the western seas is a moment worth all the honour 
we pay it, not for its own sake, but because it was 
no accident — no isolated thing ; it was one step 
in a great process, started in the most remote past 



24 FOUE AMERICAN CENTURIES 

and even as yet unfinished. In itself it might 
have meant as little as the landfall of those half- 
legendary Norsemen who have left behind them 
no more trace than the winter tales of their sagas. 
But the landing of Columbus means more : it is 
significant to all men, as a part of the direct proc- 
ess by which human beings finally came to know 
the inevitable limit of material things. 



II 



As I write that phrase it sounds mysterious. 
Yet what it means, any child, who will stop to 
think, can understand. Wherever we read of 
human beings in history, up to the time when 
this Western continent was discovered, we find 
that they were living in a world surrounded by 
oceans or countries they knew nothing about. 
The Romans, for instance, knew most of Europe 
pretty well, and they knew something of Asia 
and of northern Africa. But all about them, 
north, south, east, and west, the earth stretched 
on, they knew not whither. Somewhere in the 
Western Ocean there was an ultima Thule — an isl- 
and beyond which no man had gone. And there 
were faint legends of other great islands to the 
west of Gibraltar, and of a fabled Atlantis, no 
more tangible than the rivers and canals of the 
planet Mars. And just as those imperial Romans 
— in so many ways people quite as civilized as the 



FOUK AMEKICAN CENTUEIES 25 

i 

earth has ever known — lived in a world where be- 
yond known lands and seas there stretched on an 
endless region of lands and seas that were un- 
known ; so, in just such a world of endless pos- 
sibilities beyond its known limits, lived every 
human being, recorded or unrecorded, until the 
process of discovery was finished which the voy- 
age of Columbus began. 

It is worth our while, then, to consider for a 
moment just what this change in our knowledge 
of the shape and limits of the earth means. In 
order to live, human beings must be fed ; in order 
to be fed, they must cultivate and consume the 
fruits of the earth. And as population anywhere 
increases, more and more of the earth has to be 
cultivated to feed it. In this very city of Worces- 
ter, for example, there was probably a time, not 
quarter so long ago as the time of Columbus, when 
everybody who lived here could raise on his own 
land enough food to supply himself and his fam- 
ily. At this moment, though Worcester is not a 
great city like New York or London, it is a good 
deal too large to be supported by food grown on 
Worcester soil ; it has to send West for its beef 
and its flour, and so on. What is more, I should 
be surprised if there were among you many who 
do not number among your friends somebody 
who, instead of settling down at home, has gone 
West ; in other words, somebody who could not 
find at home work that would provide him with 



26 FOUK AMEEICAN CENTUKIES 

such food and clothing and comfort as he had 
made up his mind to have, and who has gone to 
a newer country in search of a quicker fortune. 
Now just such a process as each of you can under- 
stand here on a small scale, is always going on 
all over the world. The places where people 
live grow too crowded to support them ; so peo- 
ple move somewhere else where there is more 
room. 

I do not mean that people in general sit down 
and quietly think this out. In the time of Co- 
lumbus, for example, I do not suppose that many 
people in Europe actually realized that the time 
was not far off when Europe would be over- 
crowded. But, all the same, the fact was there ; 
and with it the fact that no human being, until 
long after Columbus was dead and buried, knew 
whether there might not be, beyond the known 
world, endless lands where the human beings 
who should by and by be crowded out of Europe 
might go. 

Now think of what every one of you knows to- 
day. On this globe of ours, which any of us 
might easily travel around in three months, there 
are two great continents — one in each hemi- 
sphere ; and there are some islands in the South- 
ern seas, Australia and New Zealand, and a great 
archipelago of smaller ones; and that is all. 
There is nowhere else where human beings can 
ever go. When the population of the world, as 



FOUE AMEKICAN CENTUKIES 27 

we see it mapped in any school geography, has 
increased in anything like the proportion in 
which, within less than a hundred years, the 
population of the city of Worcester has in- 
creased, the human race will have such a prob- 
lem to solve as in all its history it has never had 
before. It will be face to face with what it can 
already foresee — with the limited power of this 
earth to support life, or, to use the more mysteri- 
ous phrase with which I began, with the in- 
evitable limit of material things. 

Ill 

In the time of Columbus, four hundred years 
ago, the Old World of Europe was getting far 
nearer its own limits than anybody realized. I do 
not mean, of course, that it was within a few 
years of starvation ; such processes as I am now 
talking of move on, not by months or years, but 
by centuries. This four-hundredth birthday of 
the New World might better be called the fourth 
birthday of the whole world. But even before 
the time of Columbus, the more active men in 
Europe were getting restless; the spirit of ex- 
ploration was in the air. Travellers had forced 
their way eastward across the whole width of the 
continent of Asia. Sailors had begun to round 
the southern limits of Africa. And all this meant 
that, hardly knowing what it did, growing Eu- 



28 FOUE AMEBICAN CENTUKIES 

rope was calling to its aid the resources of the 
Indies. Had there been no Indies, or had the 
lands which Columbus always believed to be 
Asiatic proved to be anything other than the 
coasts of a new hemisphere, almost untenanted 
by man, then — even by this time — the final strug- 
gle of European humanity with the inevitable 
limit of material things might have begun. 

For, after all, looked at in a larger way, we of 
America are Europeans as truly as our language 
is English. There are differences, to be sure, be- 
tween us who have crossed the western seas and 
our kinsfolk whom our crossing has permitted to 
remain safely at home. Such differences, with 
that fine instinct of self-respect which is, perhaps, 
our finest national trait, we love to cherish, much 
as we love to cherish family pride. But just as 
our past history is as truly European as is the 
past history of Spain or of England, so is the fut- 
ure history of Europe bound to include our future 
history too. For this world we live in we know 
now to be a whole world, united in itself as 
surely as it is eternally separate from other 
planets and other systems. Its history is bound 
to be the history of the domination of that race 
which in the struggles of the ages proves most 
w T orthy to survive. And that race, I hope and 
believe, is the race of which we form a part and 
in a certain sense the advance guard — the race 
whose great records were first written, now by 



FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 29 
i 

this nation, now by that, in the history and the 

literature of Europe. 

IV 

To this history and this literature our New 
World has added its own pages. To-day we turn 
the fourth ; what shall be written on the fifth and 
those which shall come beyond, none of us may 
ever live to know. And to prophesy were idle. 
But it seems to me that we may well consider for a 
few moments the record that our New World has 
already made ; and perhaps pause for a little while 
to consider also its meaning. The limits of the 
centuries of world history are as accidental as the 
limits of the years in a man's life. Our birthdays 
are matters of chance. But just as each of the 
years which are carrying us on from cradle to 
grave has for each of us who looks back on it a 
character of its own, so when we look back on 
the four centuries that separate us from the time 
when to our forefathers all beyond the western 
sea was fathomless mystery, it seems to me that 
each of the centuries begins to grow distinct. 



The first — the Sixteenth Century of the Christian 
era — sums itself up in our American history as the 
century of exploration and of Spanish conquest. 
In the records of that time there is nothing, I be- 



30 FOUK AMEBICAN CENTUEIES 

lieve, more fascinating than the maps. Almost 
year by year, as fresh navigators brought back 
fresh reports, we can watch the islands and the 
continents emerging from the fantastic mystery 
of legendary seas. Perhaps no one feature of this 
growth is more notable than that of the region to 
which German geographers first gave the name 
of the maligned Florentine, Amerigo Vespucci — 
a name, as at last we know, that in every sense 
we may be proud to bear. Sailing to the south- 
ward of the lands where Columbus had preceded 
him, he came upon another land, seemingly inde- 
pendent of those, hitherto unknown. In the older 
maps it appears as an island, of which the exact 
limits are still to be fixed, much as Greenland used 
to appear in the school geographies of my child- 
hood. Map by map these limits grow distinct, 
until by and by we see that the first America of 
Vespucci was no island at all ; it was that eastern- 
most part of our own great continent to which 
later geographers finally gave what had once been 
the legendary name of Brazil. And as map by 
map the continent grows, we can watch the emer- 
gence into human history of these northern re- 
gions, which were destined to be the homes of 
our fathers and our children. 

During the first century of our Western history, 
however, these northern regions were little vexed 
by other than exploring Europeans. It was to 
the southward that Europeans were making their 



FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 31 

permanent mark, in the regions that still bear 
the name of the Indies, and those yet wider regions 
which to this day retain an impress that could 
have been made only by the imperial Spain of 
Charles V. and Philip II. Within our own coun- 
try, one may almost say, the only lasting mark 
of that century is the name Virginia, preserving 
for us the memory of her who, until our own 
time, might stand unchallenged as the noblest of 
English queens. Beyond our limits, in Mexico, 
in Peru, in the Indies, Spain wrote upon the face 
of the New World the ineffaceable records of a 
system in devotion to which untold millions of 
earnest lives have been and shall be spent ; a sys- 
tem which assumes that all earthly authority must 
come straight from God in Heaven, through his 
temporal and his spiritual anointed. 

VI 

The second century of American history — the 
Seventeenth Century of the Christian era — is one 
whose records mean far more to us. In the course 
of it, I believe, all but one of the colonies were 
finally settled which were destined to be the germ 
of the United States ; and those which for a little 
while owned the sovereignty of Sweden and of 
Holland yielded themselves to the authority of 
the English crown. For all that to the north of 
us the subjects of Louis XIV. were striving to 



32 FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 

gain for France such a foothold as to the south- 
ward the subjects of Charles and of Philip had 
gained for Spain, it is with no lack of confidence, 
I believe, that we may name the second century 
of American history the century of English con- 
quest. 

It was the century in which the English planters 
were finally settled on the James ; the century 
in which the Pilgrim fathers came to Plymouth 
and the Puritan colonists to Boston Bay. Our 
national records are full of traditions which be- 
long to this epoch. It was the century of Captain 
John Smith and Pocahontas, of Peter Stuyvesant 
and the old Dutch worthies of the Hudson, of 
Miles Standish and Governor Winthrop, of Roger 
Williams, of King Philip's War, of Sir Edmund 
Andros, of the Salem witches. In the country 
towns of New England there is hardly a burying - 
place whose gray stones do not bear the names of 
men and women who have been resting beneath 
the pines and the elms since the days were still 
fresh in memory when our own forefathers broke 
the soil that is still ours. But it seems to me 
that too few of us are disposed to remember 
what, as the centuries begin to pass, stands out 
as the chief record of that olden time. It was 
in the Seventeenth Century that first were planted 
in American soil the seeds of the system which, 
whether we know it or not, is the system by 
which our national life must stand or fall. In 



FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 33 

that century our continent first gave asylum to 
the race which, in its heart of hearts, acknowl- 
edged and still acknowledges no earthly author- 
ity above the common law. For, looked at in the 
light of the centuries, our own constitution and 
all that has grown up beneath it are but out- 
growths, strong with the strength that comes 
from natural, undistorted growth, of that firmest 
known system of human rights — the common law 
of England. 

VII 

The third century of American history — the 
Eighteenth of the Christian era — is a century of 
which the memory is still more our own. From 
whatever point of view one looks at it, no fact in 
its course is much more salient than the American 
Revolution. To foreigners and to superficial ob- 
servers, the chief trait of this great event seems 
perhaps to be that for the first time in modern 
history it demonstrated the power of colonies to 
break free from the control of a mother country. 
To us, I think, it has a trait more notable than 
that : it marks the beginning of our conscious na- 
tional life ; it gives us a right to name this third 
century of American history the century of native 
conquest. 

Between this century of native conquest, how- 
ever, and the two centuries of foreign conquest 
3 



34 FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 

which preceded it, there is a distinction, I think, 
which, unlike in themselves as were the con- 
quests of England and of Spain, groups them to- 
gether ; and which marks our native conquest as 
a thing apart. The purpose of the conquests both 
of England and of Spain was to impose upon a 
new world, hitherto untrodden by civilized men, 
the systems of government which had prevailed 
in old Europe. It was the purpose of our native 
conquest to impose no system on anybody or on 
any territory ; but only to maintain, in the face 
of all the military force of England, those rights 
which by the common law of England not even 
the English crown had a right to touch. This is 
the trait that distinguishes our revolution from 
all the others that have since troubled the Old 
"World and the New. One and all, these have 
striven to substitute for some old, established 
authority, some brand-new system, devised by 
enthusiasts and untried by mankind. Ours, and 
ours only, strove not to innovate, but to preserve ; 
not to manufacture a ready-made system of law 
and government, but to guard and protect in its 
normal growth a system of government which had 
been proved sound and wholesome by centuries 
of ancestral experience. 

As our glances at American history come nearer 
to our own time, their field perforce grows nar- 
rower. As I think of this third century of our his- 
tory, I find myself recalling to memory two struct- 



FOUK AMERICAN CENTURIES 35 

ures on the Atlantic sea-board which together 
symbolize much of the history we have considered. 

The first is on the Island of Cape Breton. On a 
little peninsula there, rocky, grass-grown, dotted 
with grazing sheep — a little peninsula which 
stands between the everlasting surges of the foggy 
ocean and a quiet harbor still capable of floating 
a navy — is a great line of ruined fortifications. 
About the middle of the last century, a whole 
regiment of British sappers and miners worked for 
half a year in the endeavor to blow them up and 
obliterate them. Yet all this work has only made 
huge breaches in the walls, and half -filled the 
ditches at their foot. Grass-grown, deserted but 
for the sheep and a few poor fishermen and smug- 
glers, the walls of Louisbourg still remain inde- 
structible in their outline. You or I can still 
trace there every bastion and every port. And 
this useless, deserted ruin, permanent in its de- 
fenceless strength, is almost all that remains on 
the eastern coast of North America to symbolize 
the power and the fall of that system of authority 
which France, with the example of Spain before 
her eyes, once hoped to impose upon our whole 
continent. 

The second structure is nearer home. In the 
straggling village that has grown at the mouth of 
the Piscataqua, is a fragment of an old, unpainted 
wooden house. Newer houses and village shops 
crowd close upon it now. But even in its shabby 



36 FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 

decay its great gambrel roof and its two square 
chimneys preserve a dignity of their own. It is a 
dignity less austere, less stern, less lordly than 
that of the lasting masonry of Louisbourg; but 
a dignity still far above that of the cottages and 
the shops of later times. Here in his day lived 
"William Pepperell, the Yankee merchant who, in 
the name of King George II. , took command of 
the Yankee volunteers. From this house he set 
forth, leading them against that fortress of Louis- 
bourg, where, behind the strongest military archi- 
tecture of France, the system of authority had 
intrenched itself to withstand and to oppose the 
growth of that other system whose strength lay 
in the English common law. And hither he re- 
turned, victorious with his undisciplined Yankees 
over the trained mercenaries of Louis XV. — to 
be made, in honor of his good fortune, the one 
native baronet of New England. 

In honor of his good fortune, I say, because 
whoever reads the story of that first Yankee con- 
quest must admit that our victory came half from 
the blunders of the French and half from pure 
chance, hardly at all from any skill or notable prow- 
ess of our own. In a way, I think, that very ele- 
ment of chance, of good fortune, makes the con- 
quest of Louisbourg all the more typical of the 
growth in America of that system whose strength 
lies not in force but in law. 

But Sir William Pepperell's house is to-day as 



FOUE AMERICAN CENTURIES 37 

far sunk from its high estate as is the fortress of 
Louisbourg itself. Here the American Revolu- 
tion has done its work. When he set out against 
Louisbourg, Pepperell stood for that force which 
characterized the second century of American his- 
tory as opposed to the force which characterized 
the first. Thirty years later, his descendants, un- 
changed in principle, found themselves opposed, 
not to the past but to the future. The victorious 
people of America had scant mercy for whoever 
opposed them. The Pepperells, like hundreds of 
other loyal gentlemen, saw their lands confiscated 
and themselves driven into lasting exile. And 
to-day strange villagers swarm over what were 
once their gardens and in the dismantled cham- 
bers of their dismembered house. 

In this aspect, it seems to me, the ruinous man- 
sion symbolizes, more clearly than we like to ad- 
mit, the state in which the American Revolution 
left us. In that great struggle, I believe, the Amer- 
icans were in the right, and in the right because 
what they fought for was no abstract principle, 
but rather the maintenance of their vested rights. 
In so doing, however, they were forced to be for 
the moment rebels. As rebels, it was their inevi- 
table misfortune to find opposed to them that great 
part of the best and worthiest people in the land 
who in any crisis feel bound to throw themselves 
on the side of established authority. And this 
old gray house of the Pepperells, deserted for a 



38 FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 

century and more of all who have had a birth- 
right to be there, typifies what few of us allow 
ourselves to remember — the tremendous sacrifice 
of good men and true that was the inevitable 
price of our national independence. 

VIII 

National independence — that is the substance 
of the fourth and last page of our American his- 
tory, the page we are closing now, with the Nine- 
teenth Century of the Christian era. The days of 
the Spanish conquests are past ; of English con- 
quests, too, and of native. For a hundred years 
we have held in our grasp the prize that the Old 
World proved all too weak to retain. What ac- 
count shall we give of it ? 

Our greatest national characteristic, it seems to 
me, is a superb self-confidence, born at once of 
temporary freedom from limits and of necessary 
ignorance of standards. We have had the terri- 
tory of a whole continent wherein to make our 
experiments and to correct our blunders. And 
we have never had close at hand any older and 
wiser nations than ourselves by which as a people 
we might measure our own shortcomings. It has 
been the fashion, then, very honestly to assert 
that God opened for us of America a clean page 
of history, and that the record which our free- 
born citizens are writing there is a new one in the 



FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 39 

history of mankind. At times it has seemed so 
to all of us. There is a great charm in those 
high-sounding commonplaces of triumphant de- 
mocracy that we have borrowed rather from the 
impracticable philosophy of Eighteenth -Century 
France than from the sane experience of Eng- 
land, Old and New. There is a certain sethereal 
purity in the philosophical utterances of our own 
New England which sometimes seems very mar- 
vellous to those of us who would be helped to 
live in the spirit. And we are far enough to-day 
from that terrible conflict which has knit together 
this Union with bonds closer than before it men 
dreamed of, to see that North and South alike had 
ready, when the moment came, endless armies of 
men who would lay down their lives for what 
they deemed the truth. 

But this is not all the story. We must admit, 
too, I fear, that we have in our history records 
as sordid, as corrupt, as debased as any that the 
Old World can show. We must admit that as 
this continent, which a century ago was a hardly 
explored wilderness, grows densely populous, the 
human nature that is bred here is the same old 
human nature of the ages. We have added incal- 
culably to the material wealth of mankind; we 
have added perhaps a few exquisitely pure notes 
— none the less pure for their faintness — to that 
literature which our mother tongue has for a 
thousand years been adding to the literature of 



40 FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 

the world; we have tried on a scale never at- 
tempted before the great experiment of demo- 
cratic self-government. And, when we honestly 
begin to give an account of this new page of hu- 
man history we have tried to write alone, we are 
forced, I think, to say that there is in it no new 
lesson. The law of life decrees that life shall be 
an unending struggle. Relax the limits of ma- 
terial things, as for us they have been awhile re- 
laxed, and the struggle grows less intense. But 
faster and faster, as the human race fills the earth 
whose limits we know at last, the inevitable old 
struggle for existence is upon us, with all its old 
possibilities of heroism and of baseness. 

Whether we will or no, then, the future offers 
to us of America little else than it offers all man- 
kind. As our past history is European, so our 
future history must be shared with all the world. 
And we may feel sure that whatever form it take, 
the grand outline of that future history must be 
the same as the grand outline of human history 
through all time. The life of man is an unend- 
ing struggle for existence, now with the material 
things about him, now with his own kind. Our 
fathers were fighters ; we must fight ourselves ; 
and the battle must be passed on and on to our 
children till latest time. 



FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 41 

IX 

The final question, then, for us of America to 
ask ourselves, is whether in our own history we 
can find ideals and figures that shall serve us and 
our children for watchwords in the struggle. 
There are moments when the materialism, the 
baseness, the corruption that at any moment 
mark human existence anywhere, make one sick 
at heart. The dominant fact of our national 
history, too, the fact of democracy, is sometimes 
terribly disheartening. For, with all its splendid 
generosity to the people at large, democracy at 
heart must always be the sworn foe of excellence. 
No man can excel without making other men 
seem less in comparison. And whatever tends 
to inequality, without which no excellence can 
be, arouses the spirit of democracy to fierce 
rebellion. By the side of the great histories of 
the world, then, this page of ours, despite its 
material records, seems none too rich or noble in 
those traits which make mankind better. 

But, for all this, and for all the blatant 
patriotic untruth that sometimes makes one feel 
as if all patriotism were a lie, we may find in our 
records traits and figures that, if we prize them 
well, may guide us in the struggle to come as 
surely if not so brilliantly as any in the records of 
peoples who more wdllingly recognize and respect 
superiority. 



42 FOUE AMEKICAN CENTUKIES 

The trait that above all others, I believe, we of 
the United States should reverence and cherish 
and preserve is the trait that phrases itself in the 
angry phrase of any country Yankee — " I'll have 
the law on him." Other people would fight foul ; 
we fight fair, or strive to. In our deepest polit- 
ical nature there still lurks the spirit that our 
forefathers brought from England two centuries 
ago ; the spirit —so much misrepresented since — 
that fought and won the American Revolution ; the 
spirit that, discarding all cloud-spun theories, 
declares and with self-restraint maintains the 
final authority of that common law which, dis- 
daining empty philosophies, has maintained and 
extended through the centuries those privileges 
and rights which the sure teaching of human ex- 
perience has shown us may safely be permitted 
to men. 

And if we ask what figures we may place before 
ourselves, as incarnations of what is best in our 
national history, I find myself more and more apt 
to answer that there is in our history a roll open 
to all eyes, in which those who ponder upon it 
may well feel more and more pride. It is not a 
roll of great men — rather, perhaps, of petty poli- 
ticians, some of them a bit contemptible to those 
who knew them best. Better still, it is a roll of 
native citizens called by a process that almost 
fatally excludes the higher excellences of char- 
acter, to stand for a little while before the eyes of 



FOUR AMERICAN CENTURIES 43 

the world. I mean the roll of the dead Pres- 
idents of the United States. At a moment like this 
it is not fitting to speak of the three* who still 
survive. But when their time shall come, these 
men, I believe, could ask in human history for no 
worthier place than that which shall be theirs. 
For their stations await them in the lengthening 
line of those sovereign representatives of a sover- 
eign people, for no one of whom that people has 
as yet the right to feel a blush of shame. 

* Written before the death of Mr. Hayes. 



Ill 

SOME NEGLECTED CHAKACTEEISTICS 

OF THE 

NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 



[A paper read before the American Historical Associa- 
tion at Washington, December 30, 1891 ; and published in 
the Harvard Monthly, April, 1892.] 



SOME NEGLECTED CHARACTERISTICS 

OF THE 

NEW ENGLAND PURITANS 



On February 15, 1728, the Reverend Benja- 
min Colman, first minister of the Brattle Street 
church, preached the Boston lecture in memory 
of Cotton Mather, who had died two days before. 
Cotton Mather had lived all his life in Boston ; 
there is no record, they say, of his ever having 
travelled farther from home than Ipswich or 
Andover or Plymouth. Of sensitive tempera- 
ment, and both by constitution and by conviction 
devoted to the traditions in which he was trained, 
he certainly presented, to a degree nowhere com- 
mon, a conveniently exaggerated type of the 
characteristics that marked the society of which 
he formed a part. But Benjamin Colman, at least 
in earlier life, was of different mettle. After 
graduation at Harvard College he had passed 
some years in England, at a time when clever Dis- 
senters could see good company. In Boston, 
whither he had returned late in 1699 to take 



48 THE NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 

charge of the new church subsequently known as 
the Brattle Street, he had been so liberal — at 
least in matters of discipline — as to impress the 
Mathers, who were the leaders of the strictly 
orthodox party, as a dangerous Eadical. It is not 
too much, perhaps, to say that his ministerial ca- 
reer marks the beginning of that movement in 
the Boston churches which, a century later, be- 
came Unitarianism and put Calvinism, at best, 
hopelessly out of fashion. In view of this, his 
lecture on Cotton Mather becomes curious. 

His text is the translation of Enoch: "And 
Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God 
took him." From these words he draws infer- 
ences that enable him to expound the career and 
character of the patriarch, with edifying pre- 
cision, to the length of four closely printed pages. 
But what he chiefly insists on is that Enoch's 
blessed fate 

" must be resolved into the good pleasure of God, His wise 
and sovereign will ; and to be sure it was not for any 
merit or desert in Enoch's holy walking with God. Enoch 
deserved to have died for his sins as well as any before or 
after him. . . . Elias was a man of like passions 
with others. ... It was not due to the righteous- 
ness of either that they were taken without seeing death. 
Before that God formed them in the belly he designed 
them their translation." 

In other words, the Boston divine, who at 
times seems the most Badical of his generation, 



THE NEW ENGLAND PUKITANS 49 

feels bound, as a matter of course, to begin his 
eulogy on the most distinguished of his fellow- 
ministers by an assertion in the most concrete 
terms of the doctrine of election. 



II 



Beyond question this doctrine was never, for 
many hours, absent from the mind of Cotton 
Mather, nor often from that of Samuel Sewall, 
the two worthies of the period then drawing to 
a close whose diaries are best preserved. Beyond 
question, too, these men were, in this respect, 
not peculiar, but typical of their time. There is 
hardly a figure in the first century of Boston his- 
tory whose conduct and opinions can present 
themselves, to modern temperaments, as compre- 
hensibly human, unless we keep this doctrine con- 
stantly in mind ; and keep it in mind, too, not as 
a verbal dogma, but as a living reality. It is worth 
our while, then, to recall exactly what it was. 

In the beginning, the Puritans believed, God 
created man, responsible to Him, with perfect 
freedom of will. Adam, in the fall, exerted his 
will in opposition to the will of God. Thereby 
Adam and all his posterity merited eternal punish- 
ment. As a mark of that punishment they lost 
the power of exerting the will in harmony with 
the will of God, without losing their hereditary 
responsibility to Him. But God, in His infi- 



50 THE NEW ENGLAND PUBITANS 

nite mercy, was pleased to mitigate His justice. 
Through the mediation of Christ certain human 
beings, chosen at God's pleasure, might be re- 
lieved of the just penalty of sin, ancestral and 
personal, and received into everlasting salvation. 
These were the elect ; none others could be saved, 
nor could any acts of the elect impair their sal- 
vation. 

All this is familiar enough. What puzzles pos- 
terity about it is how so profoundly fatalistic a 
creed could possibly prove a motive power strong 
enough to result not only in individual lives but 
in a corporate life, that was destined to grow 
into a national life, of passionate enthusiasm, 
and of abnormal moral as well as material ac- 
tivity. 

To understand this nowadays we must em- 
phasize a fact generally neglected by the writers 
of New England history : namely, the test by 
which the elect could be recognized. The test of 
election, the Puritans believed, was ability to 
exert the will in true harmony with the will of 
God — a proof of emancipation from the hereditary 
curse of the children of Adam ; whoever could 
at any time do right, and want to, had ground for 
hope that he might be saved. But even the elect 
were infected with the hereditary sin of humanity ; 
and besides, no wile of the Devil was more con- 
stant than that which deceived men into believing 
themselves regenerate when in truth they were 



THE NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 51 

not. The task of assuring one's self of election, 
then, could end only with life. 

Ill 

Oolman, in his funeral lecture, states this doc- 
trine very specifically : 

" To walk with God means, in all the parts and instances 
of a sober, righteous, and godly life, and constancy therein 
all our days. We walk with God in a sincere, universal, 
and persevering obedience to the written Word and re- 
vealed law of God ; and blessed are the undefiled in the 
way that walk in the law of the Lord. To walk is not to 
take a step or two, nor is it for a day or a year, but for 
the whole life, all our days. We must walk and work 
while the day lasts ; the light is given for this. How much 
.does it concern us, then, to ask ourselves whether we have 
indeed begun this walk with God and to Him ? Whither 
are we going ? What are we doing ? How do we live and 
act ; and what will become of us a few days hence ? Will 
God take us ; take us on the wings of angels and in their 
arms to His own presence and glory ; or will death drag us 
out of the body and devils take us away to their abodes 
of darkness and of fire unquenchable ? " 

The Puritans themselves would probably have 
told us, as their lineal religious followers some- 
times tell us to-day, in both cases with perfect 
honesty of intention, that this specifically as- 
serts the duty of man to give himself up to 
God, with no other purpose than to advance 
God's glory. Such a statement does not explain 
in modern terms why any living man ever really 
did so. Few facts, indeed, seem much truer to 



52 THE NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 

modern minds than that human beings do what 
they do not want to do only when some humanly 
overpowering motive makes self-denial, in the 
end, the line of least resistance. And looking 
at Colman's teaching in a modern spirit we may 
see in it, without much trouble, an appeal to 
an everyday human motive which goes farther 
than most things else to explain the apparent 
inconsistency of Puritan doctrine and Puritan 
character. In short, what ho does, and what all 
the Puritan preachers do, is to assume the doc- 
trine of election ; to declare the test of election 
to be ability to w T alk with God, to exert the will in 
true harmony with His ; and then, by every means 
known to their rhetoric, to stimulate in every 
one of their hearers the elementary and absorbing 
passion of curiosity, concerning self-preservation. 

IV 

In the diary of Cotton Mather, a most charac- 
teristic Puritan document, this trait appears in 
a form almost incredibly exaggerated. We have 
in these manuscripts a pretty full account of him 
from eighteen to sixty-one. The number of 
private fasts he kept was enormous. It is not too 
much to say that they were at least weekly through- 
out those forty-three years. For twenty-two of 
those years he habitually held vigils, too, — all- 
night watches in his library of ecstatic prayer and 
effort to penetrate the veil that is between God 



THE NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 53 

and man. And this was but a little part of his 
passionate effort to walk with God. And the 
only modernly comprehensible motive to account 
for all this passion is the one he records in a self- 
examination at the age of forty-two : 

U I am afraid," he writes, u of allowing my soul a wish 
of evil to the worst of all [my enemies]. . Q. 

Whether the man that can find these marks upon himself 
may not conclude himself marked out for the city of 

God?" 

The same trait appears in Increase Mather ; 
the same in that vastly less emotional personage, 
Samuel Sewail ; the same reveals itself distinctly 
in almost every godly portrait in that quaint 
gallery of worthies that fills so much of Cotton 
Mather's " Magnalia." 



This book, with all its obvious faults and 
errors, remains, on the whole, the chief literary 
monument of New England Puritanism. It has 
been rather the fashion, of late years, to criticise 
it as a modern historical document ; as a record of 
actual fact. As such it is certainly untrustworthy 
from beginning to end. So modern critics are 
generally disposed to put it aside as worthless, 
and incidentally, to apply the same adjective to 
its author. Psychologically, however, the " Mag- 
nalia " is a document of such historic value that 
an earnest student of Puritan New England can- 



54 THE NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 

not safely neglect it. Any work of serious lit- 
erature, we are beginning to see, must inevitably 
express, at least in its implications, the conditions 
of the society wherein it was produced. And these 
it often expresses in a conveniently generalized 
form where they may be better studied than in 
individual imases from which posterity, as best it 
may, would draw what it is apt to think more 
accurate, because more conscious, inductions. 
This is the aspect in which the " Magnalia'' is 
most significant. As a piece of literature it pos- 
sesses two traits which should follow directly 
from the fundamental self-curiosity of the Puri- 
tan character. Within arbitrary and rigidly de- 
fined limits it is intensely imaginative ; and it 
displays throughout a serene disregard for that 
fine adjustment of phrase to fact which our 
modern scientific spirit of veracity assume sfor 
the moment to be eternally the chief of the 
cardinal virtues. 

VI 

To understand the peculiar nature of its in- 
tensely imaginative quality we may best, perhaps, 
refer not to itself but to the passage from Col- 
man's funeral discourse to which we last directed 
our attention. The quality is so constant among 
the Puritans that you may find it almost anywhere. 

u Will God," he writes, " take us ... on the 



THE NEW ENGLAND PURITANS 55 

wings of angels and in their arms to His own presence 
and glory ? or will death drag us out of the body, and 
devils take us away to their abodes of darkness and of fire 
unquenchable ? " 

This sounds commonplace enough, nowadays. 
But a gentleman who once visited Goethe at 
Weimar, has told me that Goethe's first ques- 
tion was whether it w 7 ere a fact that in America 
there were still people who believed in actual 
winged and crowned angels ; and that when 
he answered, as was then true, that he believed 
in them himself, Goethe looked at him with an 
expression he can never forget and exclaimed, 
"Das ist wunderbar /" Which exclamation, my 
friend says, began his emancipation from Puritan 
anthropomorphism. To come nearer our own 
time, it is not a dozen years since in a Boston 
newspaper somebody wrote in a very serious obitu- 
ary notice concerning a secretary of the American 
Board of Foreign Missions, that "few men on 
entering heaven will find a wider circle of per- 
sonal acquaintance or a larger number of those 
under indirect obligations." 

These things all go together : Colman's angels 
and devils, the material angels of the Amer- 
ican boy of 1830, the white chokered old mis- 
sionary receiving in staid social formality the 
emancipated spirits of the Polynesian elect, and 
the godly ministers and magistrates of our Puritan 
Plutarch. In earlier and later forms they are 



56 THE NEW ENGLAND PUKITANS 

concrete examples of the way in which the faculty 
we call imagination, exerting itself for genera- 
tions within the limits of what after all was an in- 
tensely anthropomorphic creed, will first create 
for itself concrete images, only less material than 
the bronze and marble ones iconoclasm casts 
down ; and then, while denying that bronze or 
marble can be symbolic, will passionately and 
honestly assert its own images to be real. Nowa- 
days we are apt to look on all these images — 
material and immaterial alike — as only symbols. 
But Cotton Mather at least once was rewarded, in 
ecstasy, by an actual vision of an angel — wings, 
robes, crown, and all ; and there is no reason to 
question that Oolman, who was well on with his 
preparation for college at this moment of Cotton 
Mather's highest ecstasy, actually believed his 
devils to be waiting, with hoofs and horns and 
tridents, for such of humanity as the unspeakable 
free grace of his just God had not undeservedly 
released, with Enoch, from the ancestral penalty 
of human sin. 

"When Cotton Mather drew his godly portraits, 
they stood for figures so vivid in his imagina- 
tion that he had no more suspicion of their 
actual truth than of the elements of fiction 
and invention which a modern eye detects in his 
God, his angels, his devils. When Colman spoke 
of "abodes of darkness and of fire unquench- 
able," he spoke of something that to the Puritans 



THE NEW ENGLAND PURITANS 57 

represented a fact as concrete as the Tower of 
London, or as the George II of whom in the same 
lecture he writes thus : 

u What an honor should we account it if our earthly 
prince would allow us to walk after him in his garden ? 
Only a few select and favorite nobles have the honor 
done them." 

And it is not a little significant of the exhaustion 
of human power that must follow constant, over- 
wrought intensity of exercise that Colman failed 
to remark the strict incompatibility of darkness 
and unquenchable flames. 

To consider this exercise of imagination in an- 
other and more modern spirit, what it amounted 
to was this : Only by incessant assurance and re- 
assurance that the will was exerting itself in 
harmony with the will of God could the insatiable 
curiosity to know whether God's free grace were 
ours be for a moment stayed. God's way of con- 
templating things heavenly, earthly, infernal, 
belongs to that class of perceptions to which so 
many modern thinkers give the convenient name 
unknowable; it is a thing which, true or false, 
can never be verified by either observation or ex- 
periment. But the God of the Puritans, for all 
he was a spirit, was a white-bearded spirit, with 
limbs and passions, — still " le pere eternel de Vecole 
italienne" who had made man in His visible im- 
age. To them His will in regard to all things, 
great and small, was a thing not only that might 



58 THE NEW ENGLAND PUBITANS 

be known, but— if life were to possess any mean- 
ing — that must be known ; and that being known 
must be proclaimed. In the intense, incessant 
effort that followed to formulate the unknowable 
in concrete, anthropomorphic terms, imagination 
exhausted itself. "What we call the prosaic color- 
lessness of Puritan life is merely external. The 
subjective life of the Puritans was intensely, 
passionately ideal ; blazing with an emotional 
enthusiasm constantly stimulated by the unrec- 
ognized impulse of selfish human curiosity. If 
you want proof of it, ask yourselves how otherwise 
people who after all are not far from us in years 
and in blood could have survived the discipline 
and the public devotions which were to them 
what meat and drink are to the starving. 

VII 

The difficulty that followed these godly emoi 
tional debauches is obvious. To the Puritans the 
concrete images thus created in moments of 
abnormal ecstasy were more real and unspeakably 
more important than any facts of actual life. Yet 
these images, in each case inevitably the creation 
of a single brain, could neither be confirmed by 
any general process of human observation, nor 
tested by any general process of experiment. 
Each seer could tell what he himself saw; that 
was all. For the rest, these visions were such 



THE NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 59 

as human language has only metaphoric terms to 
describe. The consent that governs the meaning 
of words demands, for precision, wide identity of 
experience. We all know the insidious tempta- 
tion to impressive inaccuracy of statement which 
besets whoever has had a solitary adventure with 
a fish or a snake. Spiritual experiences are in- 
evitably solitary. Inevitably, too, they cannot be 
precisely described. Given these truths, given 
the fundamental errors of human nature, given too 
the passionate Puritan conviction that an exact 
account of spiritual experience is the only valid 
evidence you can give of your eternal salvation, 
and you get two pretty obvious results. 

The first was never better phrased than by In- 
crease Mather, perhaps the most canny of the 
Puritan divines whose career is recorded. In early 
life he habitually recorded the heavenly affiations 
that rewarded his ecstatic prayers. 

"As I was praying," he wrote once, " my heart was ex- 
ceedingly melted, and methoughts saw God before my eyes 
in an inexpressible manner, so that I was afraid I should 
have fallen into a trance in my study." — "In his latter 
years," adds Cotton Mather, writing of him, u he did not 
record so many of these heavenly affiations, because they 
grew so frequent with him. And he also found . 
that the nights of a soul rapt up into a more intimate con- 
versation with heaven are such as cannot be exactly re- 
membered with the happy partakers of them." 

The second appears very clearly in what Col- 



60 THE NEW ENGLAND PUKITANS 

man wrote of Cotton Mather, with whom in his 
day he had waged fierce fights : 

" But here love to Christ and His servant commands me 
to draw a veil over every failing ; for who is without them ? 
Not ascending Elijah himself, who was a man of like 
passions with his brethren, the prophets ; and we have his 
mantle left us wherewith to cover the defects and infirm- 
ities of others after their translation in spirit. These 
God remembers no more, and why should we ? and he 
blots out none of their good deeds, and no more should 
we." 

Nil de mortuis nisi bonum, in other words, is 
God's will — and not merely a Latin apothegm. In 
other words still, it is God's will that the whole 
truth should never be spoken. 

VIII 

The traits thus hastily specified are incessant 
activity, within rigid limits, of anthropomorphic 
imagination, strained to the utmost by life-long 
efforts concretely to formulate the unknowable ; 
and a sense of veracity weakened at once by inces- 
sant dogmatic assertion of unprovable fact and by 
constant conviction that only such truth should be 
spoken as was agreeable to the disposition of God. 
These traits appear throughout the "Magnalia." 
And whoever does not recognize in the " Mag- 
nalia " an image not to be neglected of the Puri- 
tan character can never seriously understand the 
Puritans. These traits, as we have seen, both 



THE NEW ENGLAND PUKITANS 61 

follow directly from unquestioning acceptance, in 
its most concrete form, of the doctrine of election 
at a time when its freshness had not faded into 
theological tradition. Doubts assailed the Puri- 
tans often enough, but, like Increase Mather, the 
Puritans met doubts not by reasoning — " it puts 
too much respect upon a devil, to argue and par- 
ley with him, on a point which the devil himself 
believes and trembles at " — but by "flat contra- 
diction." And the energy that, during the first 
century of Boston history, fortified them to con- 
tradictions as incessant as temptations, sprang, 
we may believe, from no mystic cause, but from 
nothing more marvellous at bottom than the al- 
most incredible stimulus which acceptance of this 
fundamental doctrine gave to self-searching, self- 
seeking curiosity. 

IX 

In discussing these old New Engianders one is 
apt to speak as if, historically, they were a unique 
class. It is perhaps worth while, then, for one 
who cannot profess to be a trained student of his- 
tory, distinctly to disclaim any such elementary 
error. Human affairs, people think nowadays, 
are as much questions of cause and effect as any 
other phenomena observable by science. Simi- 
lar conditions will produce similar characters any- 
where. And this old hierarchy of ours will very 



62 THE NEW ENGLAND PUEITANS 

probably prove more like than unlike the other 
hierarchies that by and by serious students will 
have studied comparatively. In none of them, 
any more than in this, will such fundamental 
traits as we have tried to detect prove to be the 
sole ones. In no serious study of corporate char- 
acter can the serious student for a moment forget, 
for one thing, the crushing, distorting influence of 
those petty material facts to which we give the 
convenient name of e very-day life. And certainly 
these concrete facts are generally more profitable 
subjects of study than such subjective matters as 
we have dealt with here. What is more, of course, 
such extreme traits as we have touched on char- 
acterized chiefly the leaders — the clergy, the 
priestly class. During the first century of New 
England history, however, the influence of this 
class can hardly be overstated. And just because 
the concrete facts commonly engross professional 
students and makers of history, it sometimes 
seems that such aspects of history as we have 
glanced at — aspects that in this case reveal them- 
selves with startling distinctness to an unprofes- 
sional explorer of Puritan records — have been 
perhaps unduly neglected. 

Note. — The passages from Colman are cited from " The 
Holy Walk and Glorious Translation of Blessed Enoch." 
(Boston : J. Phillips & T. Hancock, 1728. ) The other cita- 
tions are referred to authorities in my "Life of Cotton 
Mather." (New York : Dodd, Mead & Co., 1891.) From 
this is taken directly the account of the Puritan creed. 



IV 

WEEE THE SALEM WITCHES 
GUILTLESS? 



[A paper read before the Essex Institute, Salem, Massa- 
chusetts, on February 29, 1892.] 



WEEE THE SALEM WITCHES 
GUILTLESS? 



Within the past few years, I have happened, 
at the suggestion of friends interested in Psychic 
Besearch, to observe three different phases of 
occult phenomena. The first is materialization, 
a process by which professional mediums pretend 
to call up the visible and tangible bodies of the 
dead. The second is trance-mediumship ; the 
medium, in this case also professional, pretends 
to be controlled by some departed spirit who uses 
the tongue of the medium, rather unskilfully, as a 
means of communication with living beings. The 
third is automatic writing ; in this, acting as a 
medium myself, I have held a pencil and allowed 
my hand to run unwatched and uncontrolled by 
any conscious act of will. I have thus written a 
great many distinct words, and a few articulate 
sentences. 

Remote as this statement may appear from a 
confession of capital crime, and far from con- 
clusive as my limited observation and experiment 
must be, I found that when, in studying the life 
5 



66 THE SALEM WITCHES 

of Cotton Mather, I was compelled to examine 
the history of Salem witchcraft, my own occult 
experiences had induced in me a state of mind 
that led to some speculative conclusions widely 
different from those commonly accepted. These 
I shall venture to state, wholly aware that I- have 
neither the scientific nor the historical learning 
necessary to give them even a semblance of au- 
thority, but hoping that they may, perhaps, prove 
suggestive of a line of study which, in more com- 
petent hands than mine, might lead to interest- 
ing results; for I am disposed to believe not 
only that in 1692 there was existent in New Eng- 
land, under the name of witchcraft, a state of 
things quite as dangerous as any epidemic of 
crime, but also that there is, perhaps, reason to 
doubt whether all the victims of the witch trials 
were innocent. 

To explain this statement, I may best, perhaps, 
begin by briefly recounting my own observations 
and experiments, and then turn to some of the 
evidence in the witch trials. By comparing this 
with my experience and with a few facts admitted 
nowadays — such as the phenomena of hypnotism 
— I may indicate why I am disposed so heartily 
to dissent from the rationalistic view of the 
tragedy of two centuries ago, which has been so 
admirably and honestly set forth by standard 
historians. 



THE SALEM WITCHES 67 

II 

My own observations of modern occultism were 
made in the order in which I have named them. 
I saw the materialized spirits first ; later I visited 
a trance-medium ; and not till some time later 
did I try my hand at automatic writing. 

Materialization impressed me as indubitable 
fraud from beginning to end. You went into a 
room which was subsequently so darkened that 
you could not discern the hands of your watch. 
In this dim light, a small company, mostly ardent 
believers, were wrought up into such emotional 
excitement as could be awakened by hymn tunes 
played on a common parlor organ ; and presently 
uncanny shapes began to flit about. Sometimes 
these emerged from a cabinet in which the me- 
dium had professed to go into the trance-state ; 
sometimes they apparently rose through the floor ; 
at least once — to all appearances — they took shape 
on top of an ordinary three-legged table. These 
figures would talk with yon, would shake hands 
with you, would sometimes be unpleasantly affec- 
tionate in demeanor, and would often end by 
'^materializing"— that is, by suddenly flopping 
down into nothing, much as figures in the panto- 
mime disappear through trap-doors. You could 
not see how the trick was done, but the trick was 
essentially like what any number of travelling 
magicians perform. 



68 THE SALEM WITCHES 

Before long, however, you remarked that the 
habitual frequenters of these unedifying exercises 
seemed fervently to believe in them. I remem- 
ber once finding at my side an elderly man who 
passionately embraced a male spirit that appeared, 
and returning to his seat whispered to me in agi- 
tated tones that it was his son, who had lately 
killed himself. The son had been a friend of 
mine ; and when I told the father so, he begged 
the medium to recall him, that I might speak to 
him myself and be convinced. But the medium 
professed inability to recall that particular spirit 
at the moment, so I was forced to remain scepti- 
cal of everything but the fervent belief of the 
heart-broken father. Next you remarked that, 
knaves and charlatans as the mediums seemed, 
they seemed knaves and charlatans of a specific 
kind. There was no doubt in your mind that 
they lied to you and tricked you, but I for one 
could never feel satisfied as to how thoroughly 
they were aware of the exact extent of their false- 
hood — as to whether beneath all this nonsense 
and rascality there were not lurking some mys- 
terious subjective experience that had to them a 
semblance of fact. Finally, you felt a growing 
sense of debasement in such surroundings. The 
uncanny insincerity of the mediums, the crass 
superstition of the believers who formed the 
circle, the meaningless words and conduct of the 
materialized spirits — never indecent, but always 



THE SALEM WITCHES 69 

petty, trivial, low — led me by and by heartily to 
agree with a friend who declared that while he 
did not for a moment believe these were spirits at 
all, he had no shadow of doubt that if they were 
spirits they were devils. 

The chief trance-medium I visited was a woman 
of high respectability, and of great apparent sin- 
cerity of character. In her normal condition she 
professed complete ignorance of what occurred 
when she was in the trance-state. Into this state 
she could throw herself at will. Once in this 
state she assumed a voice and manner totally un- 
like her own, and professing to be controlled by 
a spirit, she gave you any number of messages 
from departed friends, whom she sometimes de- 
scribed and sometimes named. In a sitting with 
her of some two hours I remarked that, in a vague 
kind of way, she seemed to follow my line of 
thought. For example, she made a queer noise 
that reminded me of the death agony of a friend 
some time before. This recalled him to my mind, 
and the circumstances of his death. By and 
by, she named him, and described him with some 
approach to verisimilitude. The correspondence 
between what I knew and what she told me was 
never exact enough to convince me of any thing- 
extraordinary ; but it seemed close enough to 
warrant me, if I had believed in mind-reading, in 
classing her performance as mind-reading, once 
for all. At the expiration of some two hours, I 



70 THE SALEM WITCHES 

found myself obliged to request her, while still in 
the trance state, to bring the sitting to a close. 
At my suggestion, then, and not of her own ac- 
cord, she endeavored to resume her natural con- 
dition. The result was unexpected : she had a 
startling fit. Amid the contortions which accom- 
panied what she asserted to be the departure of 
the spirit which had controlled her, she fell on 
her knees with a cry of terror, and clutching me 
begged me not to let it take her away ; and she 
looked with every appearance of agonized alarm, 
at an empty corner of the room from which she 
shrank away ; you would have said she saw the 
Devil himself waiting for her. In a very short 
time she resumed her natural condition, at first 
rather dazed, and declared that she had no idea 
whatever of anything that had happened since 
she first went into the trance-state two hours be- 
fore.* 

The most remarkable thing to me about her 
was that in her normal condition she was the sort 
of person whom you instinctively believe to speak 
the truth. It was perfectly easy to assert that 
she was a common trickster ; but to my mind, at 
all events, the assertion was by no means convinc- 

* It is fair to remark here, that a friend deeply inter- 
ested in Psychic Research questions the accuracy of my 
memory in this case. I can reply only that the incident 
was unique in my experience, and so horrible as to produce 
a very lasting impression. 



THE SALEM WITCHES 71 

ing. My own impression was strongly that she 
was an honest person, in a very abnormal state, 
honestly self-deceived ; and in this abnormal dis- 
play and in this self-deception was a quality of 
debasement, more subtle, less tangible, than I 
had found in materialization, but, if you granted 
the supernatural hypothesis at all, equally dia- 
bolical. 

A year or two after this I found that if, pencil 
in hand, I left my hand free to run as it would, 
and occupied my eyes and thoughts with other 
matters, my hand would clumsily scrawl first 
queer tremulous lines, then letters, then words. 
This experience was in no wise peculiar. The 
friend who first directed my attention to these 
experiments had made a considerable collection 
of automatic writings from various people ; and 
these had in common a trait that mine shared with 
them. The avowedly un guided hand would make 
for a while — sometimes day after day — apparently 
meaningless lines that constantly repeated them- 
selves. In time, these lines would grow more 
definite. Finally a word would be written ; and 
by comparing a number of the writings you could 
trace what looked like a long series of almost im- 
potent experiments, finally resulting in this dis- 
tinct achievement. The first word my hand thus 
wrote was " sherry." 

That it was going to write " sherry " I had no 
idea. To this point I had been incredulous that it 



72 THE SALEM WITCHES 

would actually write anything at all. ' ' Sherry " 
once written, I began to feel more interest in 
what it might write next. And then soon fol- 
lowed an experience that determined me to give 
the matter up. In the first place, I found that 
experiments in automatic writing left me in an 
irritable nervous condition for which I can find 
no better name than demoralized. The whole 
fibre of character seemed for the moment weak- 
ened ; will, intelligence, self-control, temper, 
were alike inferior things after the experiments 
to what they had been before. In the second 
place, I found that very soon I could not be quite 
sure whether I actually let my hand run un- 
guided, or whether I slyly helped it write. And 
whenever that doubt arose in my mind, there al- 
ways came with it so strong an impulse to deny 
its existence, to assert that I had no idea what I 
was about, that I found myself for the moment 
a completely untrustworthy witness. In other 
words, the further I got in my very slight excur- 
sion into occult experiment, the further I was 
from intelligence, veracity, and honesty. The 
definite result of these experiments for me was a 
conviction that, at any rate, no man's word about 
automatic writing is worth the breath that ut- 
ters it. The thing is not all fraud — there is 
something very queer about it ; but not the least 
phase of the queerness is that it is constantly, in- 
creasingly credulous, tricky, and mendacious. 



THE SALEM WITCHES 73 

In reflecting on these three experiences, I 
found them by and by grouping themselves as 
three stages of what I may call a specific mental 
or moral disorder. The first and simplest was the 
automatic writing whose ill effects induced me to 
abandon the whole thing. The second w T as the 
mediumistic trance, in which a woman whom I 
believe honest in her natural character hypno- 
tized herself, and in the hypnotic state became 
perhaps abnormally perspicacious, and almost 
certainly a dangerous charlatan. The third was 
the elaborately dishonest mummery of material- 
ization, where the fraud was so palpable that it 
seemed almost indubitably deliberate from begin- 
ning to end. But comparing this deliberate fraud 
with the simpler phases of occultism that I had 
observed, I found myself more and more disposed 
to believe it a kind of deliberate fraud, in all re- 
spects debasing, into which I could easily con- 
ceive an originally honest person to be unwitting- 
ly led. 

Ill 

All this time my impressions of Salem witch- 
craft had been derived from two absorbing days 
that I had passed with Mr. Upham's book some 
years ago. It had never occurred to me to ques- 
tion his conclusions ; nor would it have occurred 
to me had I not been called on to make a careful 
study of the life and character of Cotton Mather, 



74 THE SALEM WITCHES 

whom I found on intimate acquaintance by no 
means the deliberate villain I had been led to be- 
lieve him. In making that study, I had occasion 
to read the original evidence in the witch-trials.* 
And what most impressed me in that evidence 
was its startling familiarity. The surroundings 
were in all respects different from anything I 
had known. In a century and a society far more 
remote from us in condition than they are in 
time, certain unhappy people were bringing 
against others more unhappy still charges that 
involved their lives. But the controlling spirit, 
the atmosphere of this grotesque tragedy was 
something I had known in the flesh. Whoever 
has frequented materialization seances, and who 
then reads with sympathetic imagination the 
broken records of the witch-trials, can hardly 
help admitting, I think, that these things are of 
the same kind. There is fraud in both — terribly 
tragic fraud then, grotesquely comic fraud now — 
but in both the fraud is of the same horrible 
vapourous kind ; and in both there is room for 
a growing doubt whether there be not in all this 
more than fraud and worse. If there be, that 
mysterious thing is subtly evil beyond words ; if 
there be an incarnate spirit of evil, then that mys- 
terious thing is the direct work of that spirit. 

* Woodward, W. E. Records of Salem Witchcraft, 
1691-92, copied from the original documents. Roxbury, 
1864-65, 2 vols , 4to. (Woodward's Hist. Ser., vols. 1, 2. ) 



THE SALEM WITCHES 75 

The Nineteenth Century has discarded the Devil ; 
to the Seventeenth Century, at least in New Eng- 
land, he was just as real as God. And the sin 
that transcended all other sin that could be done 
by the fallen children of Adam was the sin of 
those who, despairing of Heaven, leagued them- 
selves before their time with Hell. 

This is not the moment to analyze in detail the 
tremendous force of that doctrine of election 
which underlies Calvinism — the creed that for 
seventy years dominated New England. But 
whoever would understand the society from 
whose midst sprang the witches and the witch- 
judges of 1692 must never forget the grim creed 
which, declaring that no man could be saved but 
by the special grace of God, and that the only 
test of salvation was ability to exert the will in 
accordance with His, bred in the devout, and in 
whoever was affected by their counsels, an habit- 
ual introspection, and an habitual straining for 
mystical intercourse with the spiritual world, to- 
day almost inconceivable. In a world dominated 
by a creed at once so despairing and so mystic, it 
would not have been strange if now and then 
wretched men, finding in their endless introspec- 
tion no sign of the divine marks of grace, and 
stimulated in their mysticism beyond modern 
conception by the churches that claimed and 
imposed an authority almost unsurpassed in his- 
tory, had been tempted to seek, in premature 



76 THE SALEM WITCHES 

alliance with the powers of evil, at least some 
semblance of the freedom that their inexorable 
God had denied them. It was such an alliance 
with which the Salem witches were charged. It 
is just such miserable debasement of humanity as 
should follow such an alliance that pervades the 
evidence of the witch-trials, just as to-day it 
pervades the purlieus of those who give them- 
selves up to occultism in its lower forms. 



IV 



The question I asked myself, when this view 
of the matter became clear to me, was whether in 
this evidence I could find traces of the other 
stages of occultism to which I have already called 
your attention. To answer this question to any- 
body's satisfaction would need longer and more 
careful study than I have been able to give the 
documents ; but what little study I have had 
time for has suggested to me, more and more 
strongly, that prolonged study might yield sur- 
prising results. I will try very briefly to analyze 
the evidence, to show w r hat I mean. 

It is not generally remembered, in spite of 
Mr. Upham's admirable work, that the great bulk 
of this evidence is what was called spectral. A 
girl, for example, was bewitched, and testified 
that the physical torture she was apparently 
undergoing w T as caused by the conduct of the 



THE SALEM WITCHES 77 

apparition of one of the accused — an apparition 
providentially invisible to whoever was not be- 
witched. It was the acceptance by the court of 
this obviously worthless evidence that hanged 
the witches; it was the throwing out of such 
evidence that brought the witch-trials to a close. 
It was his momentary faith in such evidence — 
not in the horrible reality of witchcraft itself — 
that Samuel Sewall publicly repented in the Old 
South Church. And in analyzing the records of 
these old trials, we must put aside, once for all, 
every particle of spectral evidence, except as it 
tells against the witnesses themselves. 

In a way, however, spectral evidence tells against 
the witnesses themselves rather startlingly. It 
was often accompanied in full court, by conduct 
that went far to make judges and attendants 
believe it. I cite almost at random, a single 
example of what I mean. In the examination of 
Kebecca Nurse is this passage : * 

" Why should not you also be guilty for your apparition 
doth hurt also, 

u Would you have me bely myself. 

u She held her neck on one side, and accordingly so were 
the afflicted taken." 

A moment later — " Nurse held her neck on one side and 
Eliz. Hubbard (one of the sufferers) had her neck set in 
that posture whereupon another patient Abigail Williams, 
cryed out, set up Goody Nurse's head, the maid's neck 
will be broke, and when some set up Nurse's head Aa- 

*1: 86,87. 



78 THE SALEM WITCHES 

ron Wey, observed y* Betty Hubbards was immediately 
righted." 

This tells nothing whatever against Kebecca 
Nurse. What it tells against Betty Hubbard 
would have seemed a few years ago merely that 
she was a deliberate and unprincipled trickster. 
To-day, I think, it goes far to suggest a much 
less simple state of things ; namely, that Betty 
Hubbard was a hypnotic subject, so far gone as 
to be instantly affected by the slightest suggestion 
from a person on whom her diseased attention 
was concentrated. And it is typical of things that 
occurred throughout the sessions of the witch- 
courts. I am no expert in hypnotism, but what 
little I have read and seen of it so exactly corre- 
sponds with so much that is in this witch-evidence 
that I should be gravely surprised if experts 
who examined the evidence did not find the evi- 
dence going far to suggest that almost all the 
bewitched were probably victims of hypnotic ex- 
cesses. 

It is only in recent times, I believe, that care- 
ful study of the still mysterious and dangerous 
phenomena of hypnotism has tended to show that 
it depends far more on the subject than on the 
operator, and that a good subject, by careful con- 
centration of attention, can hypnotize himself. 
That the bewitched sufferers at Salem often 
hypnotized themselves is highly probable. Here 
is another extract from the evidence — this time 



THE SALEM WITCHES 79 

from one of those unaccountable confessions which 
have so baffled cool critics.* 

v 'Now Mary Warren fell into a fit, and some of the 
afflicted cryed out that she was going to confess, but Goody 
Korey and Procter and his wife came in their apparition 
and struck her down and said she should tell nothing. 

" Mary Warren continued a good space in a fit, that she 
did neither see, nor hear, nor speak. 

u Afterward she started up, and said I will speak and 
cryed out, Oh ! I am sorry for it, I am sorry for it, and 
wringed her hands and fell a little while into a fit again 
and then came to speak, but immediately her teeth were 
set, and then she fell into a violent fit and cryed out, Oh 
Lord help me ! Oh Good Lord save me ! 

K ' And then afterward cryed again, I will tell, I will tell 
and then fell into a dead fit again " — which continued 
until " she was ordered to be had out." 

A little later she was i c called in afterward in private 
before magistrates and ministers. 

" She said I shall not speak a word ; but I will I will 
speak Satan. — She saith she will kill me. Oh ! she says 
she owes me a spite and will claw me off. 

u Avoid Satan, for the name of God Avoid and then fell 
into fits again ; and cryed will ye, I will prevent ye in the 
name of God." — 

But in spite of her will, her fits persisted and " her lips 
were bit so that she could not speak so she was sent away." 

"Within two days she made an elaborate, and 
apparently mendacious confession of all sorts of 
occult absurdity, beginning with the assertion 
that her master and mistress had forced her into 

* 1 : 120. 



80 THE SALEM WITCHES 

witchcraft, making her sign a book, and that they 
had made her stick a pin into a puppet, and so on. 

Though not disposed to put much credence in 
this testimony against her employers, I am never- 
theless very much struck by the likeness between 
this poor creature's conduct before the Salem 
magistrates and ministers, and the conduct of the 
trance-medium in Boston, who, as she was emerg- 
ing at my request from her trance, begged me to 
save her from the horrible spectre she thought she 
saw in the corner. This medium was undoubt- 
edly given to hypnotizing herself. How she had 
learned to do so I do not know. Is there not 
reason to guess that Mary Warren may have been 
given to hypnotizing herself, too ; and that very 
possibly she may have been taught to do so ? 

In the midst of all this horrible confusion, then, 
there are glimpses of two of the stages of occult- 
ism to which I bore personal testimony. Is there 
any of the third, such as I dabbled in myself? 
Of automatic writing, I have found no trace ; that 
experiment I conceive to be a very modern one. 
But here is what poor Giles Corey testified against 
his wife : * 

" Last Satturday in the Evening Sitting by the fire my 
wife asked me to go to bed. I told her I would go to 
prayer and when I went to prayer I could not utter my 
desires w h any sense, not open my mouth to speake^ my 
wife did perceive itt and came toward me and said she 

* 1 : 55-56. t These italics are mine. 



THE SALEM WITCHES 81 

was coming to me. After this in a little space I did ac- 
cording to my measure attend the duty . . . My 
wife hath ben wont to sett up after I went to bed and I 
have perceived her to kneel doun on the harth as if she 
were at prayer but heard nothing." 

A mere question of temper, if you please ; but 
if he had set about to describe an elementary hyp- 
notic experiment, could he have said much other- 
wise ? And is that kneeling figure at the hearth, 
in the flickering firelight of two centuries ago, 
quite godly in aspect ? 

Again : * 

"John Blye Senior agett about 57 yeers and William 
Blye aged about 15 years both of Salem Testifieth and 
sayth yt being Imployed by Bridgitt Boshop Alies Oliuer 
of Salem to helpe take doune ye Cellar wall of The Owld 
house she formerly Lived in wee ye sd Deponents in holes 
in ye sd owld wall belonging to ye sd Cellar found seuerall 
popitts made up of Raggs And hoggs Brussells wth head- 
les pins in Them, wth ye points outward and this was 
about Seaven years Last past." 

Children's toys, to a nineteenth-century mind. 
But all through the records of mediaeval witch- 
craft and magic lie just such children's toys which 
the world believed very fatal engines of death. I 
spoke of that testimony the other day to a friend 
who happens to be — what I am far from being — 
an ardent believer in that prevalent mysticism 
called Christian Science. To me, I said, the evi- 

*1:163. 
6 



82 THE SALEM WITCHES 

dence went a good way to show that somebody 
had actually been trying in Salem to see whether 
by sticking pins into a doll you could not torture 
the enemy that the doll represented ; the practice 
certainly had existed in Europe, absurd as it must 
seem to us. To my surprise, my friend replied 
that to her it did not seem absurd at all ; any be- 
liever in Christian Science, she went on, knew 
that by concentrating your mind on an absent 
person you could affect that person for good or 
for ill ; and that while the actual sticking of pins 
into dolls could never directly hurt anything but 
the dolls, it could help a malevolent mind so to 
concentrate itself on the person a doll represented 
as to injure him with far less effort than when 
there was no doll to aid it ; which view, she 
added, was the view of Paracelsus. 

I mention that case just to remind you how 
curiously some of the educated minds of our 
own time are recurring to kinds of mysticism 
that have so long seemed purely superstitious ; 
how much more credible witchcraft is than it 
used to be, now that we see these honest, intelli- 
gent mystics all about us. 

For only change the impulse of these very 
people from the pure one it generally is, to the 
base one that was held to actuate the witches, 
and you have at your very firesides not a few ex- 
amples of what witches were. And do not the 
silenced husband of Martha Corey, and the pin- 



THE SALEM WITCHES 83 

riddled dolls hidden in Bridget Bishop's cellar 
wall go at least a little way to suggest that per- 
haps they had made unholy experiments? 

Only a little way, I hasten to add. No one can 
be better aware than I that such evidence as I have 
offered here is very slight — at best not more than 
suggestive. Nor can anyone know better than I 
what I cannot too earnestly repeat, that I have 
neither the scientific nor the historical learn- 
ing necessary to make anything I should say 
more than suggestive to better and wiser stu- 
dents. But this evidence, typical of much more 
that can be dug out of those bewildering old 
documents, will show you the sort of thing 
that has led me both to believe that there was 
abroad in 1692 an evil quite as dangerous as any 
still recognized crime, and to wonder whether 
some of the witches, in spite of the weakness and 
falsity of the evidence that hanged them, may not 
after all have deserved their hanging. 



It remains for me to show why I believe this 
evil so serious and the crime of whoever com- 
mitted it in the seventeenth century so gross. I 
cannot do so better than by repeating some words 
I published a few months ago : * 

If, as modern science tends to show, human 

*In my Life of Cotton Mather, pp. 95-96. 



84 THE SALEM WITCHES 

beings are the result of a process of evolution 
from lower forms of life, there must have been 
in our ancestral history a period when the in- 
telligence of our progenitors was as different 
from the modern human mind as were their re- 
mote aquatic bodies from the human form we 
know to-day. It seems wholly conceivable, then, 
that in the remote psychologic past of our race 
there may have been in our ancestors certain 
powers of perception which countless centuries 
of disuse have made so rudimentary that in our 
normal condition we are not conscious of them. 
But if such there were, it would not be strange 
that, in abnormal states, the rudimentary ves- 
tiges of these disused powers of perception should 
sometimes be revived. If this were the case, we 
might naturally expect two phenomena to accom- 
pany such a revival : in the first place, as such 
powers of perception belong normally to a period 
in the development of our race when human so- 
ciety and moral law have not yet appeared, we 
should expect them to be intimately connected 
with a state of emotion that ignores the moral 
sense, and so to be accompanied by various forms 
of misconduct ; in the second place, as our chief 
modern means of communication— articulate lan- 
guage — belongs to a period when human intelli- 
gence has assumed its present form, we should 
expect to find it inadequate for the expression of 
facts which it never professed to cover, and so 



THE SALEM WITCHES 85 

we should expect such phenomena as we are con- 
sidering to be accompanied by an erratic, impo- 
tent inaccuracy of statement, which would soon 
shade into something indistinguishable from de- 
liberate falsehood. In other words, such phenom- 
ena would naturally involve, in whoever abandons 
himself to them, a mental and moral degeneracy 
which anyone who believes in a personal devil 
would not hesitate to ascribe to the direct inter- 
vention of Satan. 

Now what disposes me, scientifically a layman 
I cannot too earnestly repeat, to put faith in this 
speculation concerning occultism is that mental 
and moral degeneracy — credulity and fraud — seem 
almost invariably so to entangle themselves with 
occult phenomena that many cool-headed persons 
are disposed to assert the whole thing a lie. To 
me it does not seem so simple. I incline more 
and more to think that necromancers, w 7 itches, 
mediums — call them what you will — actually do 
perceive in the infinite realities about us things 
imperceptible to normal human beings ; but that 
they perceive them only at a sacrifice of their 
higher faculties— mental and moral — not inaptly 
symbolized in the old tales of those who sell 
their souls. 

If this be true, such an epidemic of witchcraft 
as came to New England in 1692 is as diabolical 
a fact as human beings can know ; unchecked, it 
can really work mischief unspeakable. For un- 



86 THE SALEM WITCHES 

cheeked it would mean that more and more hu- 
man beings would give themselves up to delib- 
erate, or perhaps instinctive, effort to retrace the 
steps by which human intelligence, in countless 
centuries, has slowly risen from the primitive 
consciousness of the brute creation. 

VI 

To my mind, then, the fatally tragic phase of 
the witch trials is not that there was no evil to 
condemn, but that the unhappy victims of the 
trials were condemned literally on clairvoyant evi- 
dence. And what I have already said shows that 
in all probability those really guilty of the name- 
less crime I have tried to indicate were, in my 
opinion, not so often the witches as the bewitched. 

But let us look at the matter a little more 
closely again. These wretched bewitched girls 
were in all probability victims of hypnotic ex- 
cess. In all probability they had learned, will- 
ingly or unwillingly, to hypnotize themselves. 
Is there not a likelihood, then, that first of all they 
may have been hypnotized by others ? And is 
there not, in the records of those terrible days, 
some faint suggestion that among those who first 
dragged the wretched girls down may have been 
some of the accused ? The actual charges are 
sometimes manifestly false, almost always utterly 
incredible —lying, contradictory, vapourous — but 



THE SALEM WITCHES 87 

beneath them all there remains a something 
which would make me guess that not all of the 
accused believed themselves innocent. 

Put yourself for a moment in the place of those 
petty New England Calvinists, born and bred un- 
der an iron creed that forbade all hope of salva- 
tion to any but the elect of a capricious God. 
Fancy yourself toiling for years in vain to make 
your human will agree with His, to find in your- 
self the divine marks of grace. Then fancy your- 
self, in a moment of despair, toying with occult 
experiment — not as a scientific observer of the 
Nineteenth Century, but as a creed-ridden zealot 
of the Seventeenth, bound to believe that mysteri- 
ous phenomena are the direct handiwork of either 
God or Satan. Fancy yourself finding that you 
could exercise over other and weaker wills than 
yours, that power which, under the name of 
hypnotism, scientific folks are studying to-day, 
and not a few of them denouncing as terribly 
dangerous. Fancy yourself finding that the more 
you exercised this power the more your victims 
yielded to it. Remember the debasement and 
the fraud that come as hardly resistible tempta- 
tions to dabblers in occultism to-day. And then 
ask yourselves if anyone who yielded himself up 
in old Salem to such temptations as these, could 
have doubted that, in the Devil's mysterious way, 
he was doing the Devil's chosen work. 

I cannot assert a single one of the dead witches 



88 THE SALEM WITCHES 

to have been such a figure as I have asked you to 
fancy. But I can assert that if any of them were 
by chance such a figure — and it seems to me 
that careful study might go far to show that more 
than one of them may have been — then the 
dreadful fate that came to him, though it came 
through evidence hopelessly weak and false, was 
his moral due. 

VII 

I have said enough to suggest to you the view 
of Salem witchcraft that has forced itself on me. 
From personal observation I have seen enough of 
modern occultism, of the lower kind, to believe 
it unholy. From the evidence of the witch-trials 
I have gathered hints enough to make me believe 
that beneath its horrible vapourous confusion lurks 
just such unholiness as I have seen in the flesh. 
And no one who knows a bit of the inner history 
of New England Puritanism can doubt that if this 
be true, then there were in old Salem men and 
women who had deliberately sinned against God. 
I have told all this in a manner that may well 
have seemed too personal, too assertive of myself. 
I have chosen to tell it thus deliberately. No 
one can be better aware than I that, to be proved, 
such views as I have suggested need the full 
authority that should come from years of scientific 
and of historical research. No one can know 
better than I how far I am from such learning as 



THE SALEM WITCHES 89 

should give my words authority. But sometimes, 
I think, a frank statement of how an old matter 
looks to a fresh eye that glances at it never so 
superficially, may suggest to eyes familiar with 
it, views that their very familiarity would have 
prevented them from seeing for themselves. Such 
a service as this is among the best that men of 
letters can do for men of learning. And it is only 
as one who has tried to make himself a man of let- 
ters that I have earned the privilege of telling 
here not what is known of old Salem, but what 
seems to me perhaps knowable. 

One reflection I shall venture to add. It is 
customary to regard the witch-trials as histori- 
cally unimportant, except as a dreadful example 
of human delusion. If the views presented in 
this paper are valid, however, the witch - trials, 
far from being fruitless, may have accomplished 
a result of lasting importance in the history of 
New England. There was little more playing 
with occultism here, I think, until modern spirit- 
ualism arose, to be followed by the excessive in- 
terest in occult matters so notable within the last 
ten years. It seems more than possible, then, that 
the witch-trials, surrounding the whole subject 
with horror, may actually have checked for more 
than a century the growth of a tendency which 
unchecked, in the formative period of our na- 
tional life, might gravely have demoralized our 
national character. 



V 

AMEEICAN LITEEATUEE 



[An Address made at Vassar College, on January 27, 1893.] 



AMEEICAN LITEKATUKE 



Among the Christmas-cards that lately rilled the 
windows of Cambridge shops was one that clearly 
distinguished itself from the rest. Quite large 
enough to frame, it included six oval passe-par- 
touts ; and from these, executed with conven- 
tional flattery, gazed six heroic faces : the faces 
of Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Whittier, Haw- 
thorne, and Dr. Holmes. In the midst of chromo- 
lithographed angels, stars of Bethlehem, belfries, 
snow-storms, grotesques, these six worthies of 
New England were pleasant things to look at. In 
the midst of mere conventions any fact not yet 
lifelessly conventional is a pleasant thing, and 
surely an American can hardly look at those six 
faces without a feeling of pride. Here are men 
of our own blood and almost of our own time, 
men whom any of us that has reached the thresh- 
old of middle age might have known well. 
Only one of them is with us still, but the others 
are gone only a little before. We shall all pass 
together into that shadowy future where the 
generations shall merge. In a sense, then, these 



94 AMEEICAN LITEEATUEE 

men are our leaders ; and they are noble leaders 
to follow. Whatever their shortcomings, what- 
ever their errors, the world rarely affords the 
spectacle of such a group : silently chosen from 
among their fellows for honest work honestly 
done, honest words honestly spoken, these men, 
as we study their lives, triumphantly prove how 
nearly stainless human manhood may be. 

In certain moods, one goes on to say, this is 
answer enough for whoever still questions the 
claim of American literature to a place among 
the literatures of the ages. In such moods one 
has only to look at these faces, to utter these 
names. The questioner whom these will not 
silence, one feels, is a questioner who will never 
accept an answer. We know the lives of these 
men ; and no lives were ever better. We know 
their work, which any man may look at. That 
is enough. Let us trust posterity. 

Posterity will judge ; that is certain. It will 
judge, too, with unthinking impartiality — with- 
out acrimony, without tenderness. What man- 
kind wants or needs it will preserve and remem- 
ber ; what mankind finds useless it will cast aside 
and forget. That is what makes the past seem 
heroic to all eyes not unduly sharpened by the 
engines of science. " It is the sin and the tumult 
and the passion of human life that die. En- 
shrined in art the beauty of the old days lives, 
and it will live forever." And even though 



AMEEICAN LITEEATUEE 95 

science nowadays teach us the suggestive truth 
that the old days which we have reverenced were 
after all, when the sun still shone on them, days 
of turbulence and wickedness disheartening as 
any that surges about us now, that same science, 
one often thinks, is prone to forget the deep law 
of human nature which makes each generation, in 
the end, remember instinctively of those that are 
gone before only or chiefly those traits and deeds 
which shall add to the wisdom and the power of 
humanity. 

So from among the written records of past time 
the posterity of which you and I are part has un- 
wittingly selected some which are of lasting value. 
These we call literature. What literature con- 
tains for us already, nobody quite knows as yet. 
Modern learning, they say, at last exploring the 
mysteries of the East, discerns and reveals to us 
more and more records, unknown to us for cen- 
turies amid what used to seem the outer darkness 
of India or China, from which perhaps we of the 
Western world may by and by glean things worth 
having. But our own possessions are already 
rich. We have the great literature of the He- 
brews ; we have the literatures of Greece and 
Eome, the literatures of Italy and Spain, and 
France, and Germany, and England. It is to 
this list that we so confidently try to add our own 
literature of America. 

Already, our confidence seems less certain than 



96 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

when we were considering by themselves the six 
worthies of New England. Already we begin to 
see that, discarding all literatures but those of 
Europe, there is a group of great figures among 
whom Homer and Dante and Shakespeare are 
perhaps supreme, but only in a great company of 
notable personages pressing closely about them. 
It is in such company as this that we claim place 
for Emerson, and Longfellow, and Lowell, and 
Whittier, and Hawthorne, and Holmes. Very 
clearly, we cannot claim it as confidently as when 
at first we only looked at their faces and remem- 
bered their lives. To be confident at all, in fact, 
one way or the other, we must hesitate. We 
must ask ourselves first what literature is; then 
by what right any men or any people may claim 
a place in its history or its hierarchy ; and final- 
ly, what these heroes of ours and our other fel- 
low-countrymen have done to make good the 
claim that we rather urge for them than they for 
themselves. 

II 

Literature, then, we may perhaps define as 
the lasting expression in words of the meaning of 
life. 

Whatever our philosophy, we must admit that 
to every conscious being life presents itself as 
an endlessly interwoven web of impressions to 
which we give the names thought and emotion. 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 97 

What things are in themselves no philosophy has 
finally settled; but how things present them- 
selves to human intelligence even the vulgar in- 
stinctively know, each for himself. This instinc- 
tive knowledge, this fundamental sense of the 
reality of thought and emotion which each of us 
possesses, which all of us share in common, grows, 
as we contemplate it, more and more wonderful. 
Our senses bring to our intelligence images of 
material things, — commonplace, beautiful, repel- 
lent. Some faculty within us brings to our in- 
telligence conceptions of pleasure and of pain-, of 
utility and of danger, of good and of evil. To 
each of us, even before he is grown old enough 
to talk, this great panorama of human experience 
is a thing that has already begun to impress him 
somehow. In what seems inextricable confusion, 
he is aware of something not himself that defines 
itself in a thousand phantasmagoric forms, end- 
lessly awakening in him those myriad reactions 
that together make the individuality by which he 
is known to others. These impressions and these 
reactions slowly group themselves. By and by 
one comes to know some of them as hateful, some 
as noble, some as alluring. By and by one grows 
to feel that some of these should be sought, some 
repelled. High or low, good or evil, spiritual 
or material, ideals declare themselves. At most 
times we are merely aware of this vast web of ex- 
perience weaving itself inexorably about our in- 
7 



98 AMEEICAN LITEEATUEE 

telligence from without and from within. When, 
at rare moments, we pause to contemplate it, 
we generally contemplate it only in fragments. 
There are other moments, far more rare, when 
for awhile we try to contemplate it as a whole. 
When thus, deliberately or instinctively, we pause 
to contemplate life, in whole or in its smallest part, 
we are sure to discover that what we contemplate 
impresses us in a way peculiar to itself and to us. 
In other words, it has a meaning, be that meaning 
only a transient sense of vulgar pleasure or pain, 
or be it what we deem the nobler conceptions of 
philosophy or religion. And this meaning, which 
we have power to express, is the substance of 
which all art, and so all literature, is made. 

We have power to express it, to share it with 
others. This power we are always exerting — in 
every word we utter, in every quiver of muscle 
that tells the unending story of human pleasure 
and pain, grief and joy. Most of our expressions, 
incalculably most, are trivial things and pass- 
ing, little more significant than the purrs or the 
whines of animals that we are fond of calling 
lower than ourselves. Sometimes, however, in- 
stinctively or deliberately, men express the mean- 
ing of life in a way that is not quite trivial or 
passing. In plastic form, from the scratched 
bones of prehistoric caverns to the splendour of 
Periclean Athens or the Italy of the Medici, there 
have been records of what human eyes have seen 



AMEEICAN LITEEATUKE 99 

that make humanity permanently richer. In 
mnsic, from the twanging bowstring of savages to 
the ^ethereal orchestra of Beethoven or of Wag- 
ner, there have been such records of what human 
ears have heard. This protean meaning of life 
has phases that are lasting, the record of which, 
by whoever is fortunate enough or great enough to 
perceive them, is permanently significant. Such 
records, such expressions as these are what make 
each generation richer in the possession of more 
and more experiences which the inexorable con- 
ditions of space and of time have forbidden them 
in the flesh. Sometimes these records have a sig- 
nificance chiefly sympathetic, declaring through 
the centuries how men have been men from old- 
est time. Sometimes they actually reveal to us 
aspects of life which otherwise we might never 
have known. Sympathetic or enriching, these 
records which are permanently significant, these 
expressions of the meaning of life which are 
lasting, are the body of all art, and so of all liter- 
ature. 

Of these lasting expressions of the meaning of 
life, some, as we have seen, are in plastic form, 
bearing their message, in architecture, in sculpt- 
ure, in painting, to whoever having eyes will see ; 
some, in the form of music, bear their message to 
whoever having ears will hear. Some, however, 
and these perhaps the most definitely significant, 
phrase themselves not in these forms, which the 



100 AMEEICAN LITEKATUKE 

laws of human nature render in each generation 
practicable only by the few who are born with 
the power of mastering them ; but in that other 
form, not more easy of mastery though so incal- 
culably more familiar in practice, by which hu- 
man beings are agreed to conduct the affairs of 
daily life. It is such lasting expressions of the 
meaning of life as these — such lasting expressions 
as are phrased in words — to which we give the 
name literature. 

Ill 

By what right, was our second question, may 
' any man or any people claim a serious place in 
the history of literature or in its hierarchy ? Be- 
fore we try to answer this with certainty, I think, 
we shall do well to consider perhaps the most 
notable feature of the vehicle which literature 
employs — the chief characteristic of words. 

Lines and colours, the vehicles of the plastic 
arts, are essentially imitative ; whoever has looked 
at nature can recognize in the work of architect, 
sculptor, or painter the effort to make its literal 
. or conventional image. The very vagueness, the 
intangible ^ethereality of the emotions most fitly 
phrased by the melodies and the harmonies of 
music make these melodies and harmonies elu- 
sively, mysteriously intelligible to whoever has 
felt the experience that gave them birth. Words, 
however, though we use them so constantly that 



AMEKICAN LITERATURE 101 

we hardly know ourselves in other than verbal 
terms, are neither imitative, like lines and colours, 
nor inevitable as the strains of music. Essential- 
ly their meaning is as arbitrary as that of the let- 
ters by which we have agreed to symbolize them. 
Instinctively fit as the words seem by which you 
and I exchange our thoughts, we all know that 
they are meaningless, except after months or 
years of study, to anyone whose native tongue is 
not English ; and we have only to glance at any 
obvious monument of Roman antiquity — at the 
Arch of Constantine, for example — to feel the 
difference between the lastingly intelligible plas- 
tic form in which imperial power was expressed, 
and the puzzling obscurity of even the simplest 
inscription phrased in terms no longer used by 
human beings. Intelligible to those who are 
agreed to use them, these arbitrary symbols that 
we call words have no meaning to those who have 
not learned, by environment or by study, what 
meaning has been attached to them by the tacit 
consent of those by whom they are used. Arbi- 
trary, intelligible only to those whom chance or 
effort has made masters of them, these words 
which literature employs to express the lasting 
meaning of life vary with every language that 
human beings have grown to use. According as 
we know language or not, then, literature is either 
the most familiar of arts or the most unmeaning. 
This very diversity of languages, however, se- 



102 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

riously as it must limit the range and the pow- 
er of any single literature, greatly extends the 
range and the power of literature in its broader 
sense. No commonplace, when one considers, 
is much more pregnant than that which asserts 
the inevitable discrepancy between the number 
of ideas that form part of every man's experience 
and the number of words at his disposal to name 
them. It is a large dictionary that contains a 
hundred thousand words ; and a copious author 
who uses of these above ten or twelve thou- 
sand. Yet the varying experiences even of a sin- 
gle conscious day might almost be numbered 
by millions. At best, the vocabulary of any lan- 
guage names only in a tentative, approximate way 
the thoughts and emotions it recognizes. At 
best, any grammar expresses the relations of these 
ideas within very narrow limits. In the hurried 
intercourse of every day we are too busy, our per- 
ceptions too much blunted by habit, to be aware 
of how little beyond the experiences common to 
every day the language at our disposal will ex- 
press. But try for a moment to phrase any idea 
not quite familiar, try to impress even your most 
familiar idea on some one to whom it is strange, 
and you are face to face with the inevitable in- 
adequacy of language to do more than faintly 
symbolize the immaterial reality of thought and 
emotion that you know within yourself. What is 
thus true of us as individuals is true of those 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 103 

races, as races, that have agreed to use a com- 
mon tongue. Try to translate the simplest words 
from the languages most intimately connected 
with ours — ennui, for example, or blase — and you 
will often find that though we know just what 
they mean we have no name of our own by which 
English-speaking folks have agreed to express it. 
Try to translate the title of Dante's " Convito" : 
you will say feast, but feast combines for us no 
two words that mean by themselves a living to- 
g ether. These trite illustrations are enough. 
Each language names ideas in a way peculiarly 
its own. The common agreement on arbitrary 
symbols that at length results in the vocabulary 
of any language is sure to produce symbols that 
stand for peculiar aspects of the real thought and 
emotion which language tries to define — for as- 
pects, in other words, which differ from those 
named by any other tongue. And what is thus 
plainly true of words by themselves is just as true 
of words in combination. The difficulty we find 
in mastering a foreign grammar is more than for- 
mal ; each foreign grammar defines in ways of its 
own relations of thought which our grammar 
neglects, and neglects meanwhile relations that 
our grammar defines. What can express in Eng- 
lish, for example, the relations so definitely ex- 
pressed by the inflections of Latin or of Greek ? 
What in Latin or Greek the almost sexual gender 
of English? In its vocabulary, in its grammar, 



104 AMEKICAN LITEEATURE 

in its entirety, each language must express the 
lasting meaning of life in aspects different from 
those expressed by any other. Limited as the 
range of any one language must be, then, or of 
any one literature, the range of language and 
literature, in their broadest sense, may be called 
almost limitless. 

A growing sense of this perhaps underlies the 
impatience of some modern scholars with the old 
classification of literature. The notion of na- 
tional literatures, they feel, is artificial, archaic. 
It were better to gather all literature together, to 
study it comparatively, neglecting the accident of 
phrase, looking rather at the growing, developing 
range of thought and emotion that the combined 
literatures of the ages express. In this feeling 
there is much that commands one's sympathy. 
Words as words are dead things — arbitrary sym- 
bols incredibly less meaning in themselves than 
the lines of plastic art or the strains of music. 
The pedantry that so enshrouds linguistic learn- 
ing, too, even in its innermost strongholds, makes 
these dead words often seem farther from vitality 
than in fact they are. Yet no impatience with 
artificiality, with archaism, with pedantry, can 
conceal in the end the actual fact that underlies 
the old classification of national literatures. Each 
national literature expresses the lasting meaning 
of life in its own peculiar language; and each 
language, we have seen, names the innumerable 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 105 

phenomena of life in aspects and in combinations 
that to a greater degree or a less, every other 
language neglects. In the nature of language it 
seems inherently necessary that as each new 
tongue develops to a point where it can lastingly 
express the meaning of life it must express that- 
meaning in a manner of its own. 

We can answer our question better now. By 
what right, we asked, may any man or any people 
claim a serious place in the history of literature or 
in its hierarchy? In its history, we may say, by 
one of two rights : either by expressing in words 
some phase of the lasting meaning of life which 
words have not hitherto expressed ; or by ex- '■ 
pressing some known phase of that meaning in 
words more lasting than those which have hitherto 
expressed it. In the hierarchy of literature, we 
may go on to say, a serious place can be claimed 
only when both rights are combined — when a man 
or a people has given to the world an expression 
of the meaning of life at once new and final. 

It is for expressing a strange, dreamy, fleeting 
poetry of feeling that people are tardily accord- 
ing a place in the history of literature to the 
vanished poetry of the British Celts. It is for a 
vague, half-slumbrous sense of Titanic awakening 
— God knows to what end — that many are to-day 
disposed to accord such a place to the new litera- 
ture of Russia. It is for startling flashes of in- 
sight through the murky shams of modern con- 



106 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

vention that of late it has been the fashion to 
claim such a place for Henrik Ibsen, and chiefly 
by right of his genius for the literature of Nor- 
way. To pass to greater things, it is not for fresh- 
ness of thought but for unsurpassed power of 
condensation and epigram that we may most cer- 
tainly claim such a place for the ultimately com- 
pact literature of the Latin tongue. It is for a 
sense of order, of lucidity, of amenity unequalled 
in any other modern language that so many ac- 
cord the first place in contemporary literature to 
the literature of France. 

To pass to greater things still, the literature of 
the Hebrews most of us know only in the modern 
versions by which, since the time of Luther, it 
has become the great motive force of the Protes- 
tant world ; but as version after version adds each 
something to our composite notion of what the 
fact that all stand for must be, not a few of us are 
willing to believe that in its native form that 
literature, expressing spiritual truths as none has 
expressed them since, may well be such as to give 
colour to the old dreams of verbal inspiration. 
The literature of Greece is half closed to men of 
our time by the transitional pedantry that in our 
school-days has passed for education ; yet even 
we can appreciate it enough to know that in its 
native form it expresses its meaning with an ex- 
quisitely modulated precision not to be dreamed 
of by those who know it only in the guise of 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 107 

translation ; and those who know it only thus 
seem more and more aware that even to them it 
phrases, in a way that nothing can supplant, the 
view of life which has made so many thoughtful 
generations deem the word classic only less sacred 
than the word holy. So far, perhaps, I have 
spoken hearsay. There are two supreme writers 
— Dante and Shakespeare — whom it has been 
my own fortune to know from the very words 
they wrote. And as the years pass I realize 
for myself more and more — as all who know su- 
preme things must realize — why such work as 
theirs were alone enough to give a lasting place 
in the hierarchy of literature to the languages in 
which each has finally expressed a meaning of life 
which before him none had quite perceived and 
after him none need phrase. 

We have doubtless seemed to stray from our 
subject, from America. Yet with less general 
consideration we should hardly have been able to 
discuss American literature fairly. For in all 
fairness we are bound to admit that only by such 
rights as we have tried to define may any man or 
any people claim a serious place in the history of 
literature or in its hierarchy. 

IV 

The question that is left us is becoming more 
definite. Have we Americans as a people, or 



108 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

have men among us as individuals made good 
any claim to a serious position in literature ? To 
put the question bluntly, What does American 
literature amount to ? 

We should be able to see that the question is 
not easy to answer off-hand ; that the fine, if 
over-sensitive patriotism which so often impels us 
to assert that our literature amounts to pretty 
much all creation, is little more reasonable than 
the still more sensitive reaction from such patriot- 
ism, which makes some of us occasionally feel 
like saying that it does not amount to anything. 
The question is really one of simple fact ; but of 
simple fact that is rather hard to get hold of. In 
all the other literatures we have touched on there 
is one important trait which ours obviously lacks. 
Celtic Britain, Bussia, Norway, Rome, France, 
have had each a language of its own ; so have the 
Hebrews, and Greece, and Italy, and England. 
The one fact which we must definitely admit about 
ourselves is that for better or worse we think 
and speak in English. There are things called 
" Americanisms," of course, frequently discover- 
able only in dictionaries compiled elsewhere than 
in America. There is hardly one of the United 
States, however, whose current speech is so far 
removed from the normal standard of literary 
English as is the dialect of Devonshire or of 
Yorkshire. Whatever we have of our own, we 
have as yet no distinct language. When we ask 



AMEEICAN LITEKATUBE 109 

if we have an American literature, then, we really 
mean to inquire whether as a people or as indi- 
viduals we have added anything distinctively our 
own, in thought or in phrase, to that lasting ex- 
pression in words of the meaning of life which is 
the common property of the English-speaking 
world. 



In considering this question we may conven- 
iently remind ourselves of the broad facts of our 
national history. The facts of national history 
are the memoranda of national experience. If in 
these we find experiences peculiarly ours, we 
shall have found at least the material for a na- 
tional literature, whether we have used it or not. 

Briefly, then, we may say that our national his- 
tory covers about two hundred and fifty years ; 
that, broadly speaking, it is the history of a 
series of emigrations from a highly civilized, 
overcrowded world, — in the beginning, to a wil- 
derness where there was plenty of room, and un- 
til very lately to a continent, still unsettled in 
every sense of the word, where the material prob- 
lems of life have presented themselves much less 
definitely than in Europe. Broadly speaking, the 
earlier of these emigrations were remarkable for 
excellence of personal quality ; among the settlers 
of New England, for example, the proportion of 
people who amounted to something, cannot fail 



110 AMEBICAN LITEKATUEE 

to impress whoever studies the documents they 
have left us. For nearly two centuries these emi- 
grations were not remarkable either for excellence 
of personal quality or for badness; they com- 
prised good, every-day people whom any decent 
community could absorb without danger. Dur- 
ing the greater part of our own lifetimes the 
quality of these emigrations has again become re- 
markable, until one may guess that not a few 
native American hearts were tempted to greet 
with un-Ohristian enthusiasm even the epidemic 
cholera which lately checked, though only for a 
little while, the influx of degradation that had 
been swirling upon us from every moral and 
political pest-hole in Europe and Asia. Broadly 
speaking, the motive of the first emigration to 
New England — the emigration whose traditions 
have most profoundly affected our national 
thought — was, in the words of Eichard Mather, a 
desire to remove 

" from a place where all the ordinances of God cannot be 
enjoyed unto a place where they may ; " 

in other words, the Puritan fathers were prepared 
to make any sacrifice for the purpose — profoundly 
human in spite of all their godliness — of manag- 
ing their affairs, temporal and spiritual, in their 
own way. Broadly speaking, the successive emi- 
grants not personally noteworthy, who for two cen- 
turies or so added their energies to those of the 
fathers and their direct descendants, came hither 



AMEKIOAN LITEKATUEE 111 

for the purpose of making their fortunes. The 
unhappily remarkable emigration of the last gen- 
eration seems to have been impelled by a purpose 
less definite than these ; but it is not easy to dis- 
cover for such unfortunate people as now swarm 
about us any much more useful function in 
human society than the making of mischief. 
Broadly speaking, then, the social aspect of our 
national history shows us first a people remark- 
able for self-assertion and singularly free from 
the problems which the struggle for life presents 
in any densely populous community ; secondly, 
a people whom this very freedom permits to 
attain, with less concentrated effort than others, 
a remarkable degree of rather irresponsible ma- 
terial prosperity ; and, finally, a people whose very 
prosperity has brought upon them, in their New 
World, almost precisely the problems which un- 
til lately they have prided themselves upon hav- 
ing escaped or solved. 

Politically, our national history is even a more 
familiar commonplace. It begins with the devel- 
opment of communities geographically remote 
from the centre of power to a degree now incon- 
ceivable, and by this very fact both permitted 
and compelled to develop real centres of power 
within themselves. It proceeds through that 
great struggle for national independence and 
unity in which all the mists of philanthropic and 
rhetorical bombast that now obscure it cannot 



112 AMEEICAN LITEEATUEE 

conceal the victory of reality over sham, of facts 
over words and theories. It comprises that terri- 
ble experience of national distemper when with- 
in ourselves two systems that could not coexist 
fought, each nobly, to the death. It finds us 
now face to face with the world-old problem, new 
only to us among the nations, of how when the 
struggle for life grows fierce, human power can 
preserve those things which are good and repress 
those which are evil. 

In our discussion of American literature, we 
may best put the present aside. And this for 
more reasons than one. Our present and our 
future, for one thing, differ little from the pres- 
ent and the future of all European humanity. 
If we face our problems differently, it is not 
because the problems themselves are different, 
but because our two or three centuries of Ameri- 
can experience have made us other than we 
should have been had we remained with our 
kindred across the Atlantic. Again, no man can 
fitly estimate himself, nor can any period ; it is as 
if a soldier or a captain, ignorant of his general's 
knowledge and plans, tried to tell in the midst 
of a campaign its whole history and significance. 
And less certainly, but more powerfully, a feeling 
perhaps sentimental but not fleeting, makes some 
of us dread to seek or to recognize in the actual 
world of which you and I are part actual signs of 
a great, lasting record of its meaning. For one 



AMEKICAN LITERATURE 113 

sometimes thinks that the history of fine art, in 
all its phases, teaches a lesson that the lovers of 
fine art dread to learn. Such expressions of the 
meaning of life as prove lasting, one feels in such 
moods, are the final expressions of states of things 
almost past. In such moods, the stories of the 
Athens of Pericles, of the Eome of Augustus 
Csesar, of the Italy of Raphael and of Michael 
Angelo, of the England of Shakespeare, seem the 
same; and these names seem to name only in- 
stances of an inexorable law. The end of man, 
one feels like saying, is expression ; but expres- 
sion is just as truly the end of man. The songs 
that live are the swan-songs. 

Aspiration to make all our art fine — all our 
records, of every kind, lasting and beautiful — is 
surely a noble thing. Not to foster, not to en- 
courage such aspiration is just as surely igno- 
ble. But there are moods in which such aspira- 
tion seems something like earthly preparation for 
heaven. The best of us are really best because 
they are constantly preparing themselves for 
what inevitably must come. When the time for 
heavenly glory comes, of course, or for great artis- 
tic expression, it is only those who are best by the 
noblest standards of human experience that are 
anything like ready. If on earth or in heaven, 
then, we of America are ever to be lastingly noble, 
we must never relax our effort always to be as 
noble as we can ; but the very end we hope for 
8 



114: AMERICAN LITERATURE 

is an end that at the same time we dread. As 
lovers of art we may well regret that among our- 
selves we find at this moment no expression of 
what this actual life of ours means which forces 
itself upon us as undoubtedly lasting. As patri- 
ots, though, and as human beings who love with- 
out knowing why this actual state of life that 
for a little while is ours, we may take comfort in 
the thought that our vital energies as a people 
are still thoughtlessly engaged in action, not yet 
thoughtfully or recklessly in contemplation or in 
expression. There are few surer warrants of the 
soundness of our national youth. 

Our real meaning, then, when we ask what 
American literature amounts to, is this : Have we 
lasting expressions of the meaning of the past 
periods of American life, in words which have 
added either thought or phrase to the literature 
of the English language ? 

VI 

The fathers of New England were almost as 
prolific in mind as in body. The fate of their in- 
tellectual offspring, too, resembled that of their 
physical — generally it did not survive. And 
tradition, remembering chiefly the titles of their 
sermons and their pamphlets and their treatises, 
much as it remembers the extremely Christian 
names of their children, reports their work as 



AMEKIOAN LITEEATUEE 115 

godly, narrow, dull, dreary, fruitless — anything, 
in short, that should repel a reader. 

In a way, they have been unduly abused. 
People nowadays know so little of what Seven- 
teenth-Century Yankees actually wrote, that it is 
perhaps worth our while to consider a bit of Sev- 
enteenth-Century Yankee narrative. It is from 
Cotton Mather's "Magnalia," where it closes his 
account of Theophilus Eaton, the first Governor 
of New Haven : 

u His eldest son he maintained at the Colledge until he 
proceeded master of arts ; and he was indeed the son of his 
vows and hopes. But a severe catarrh diverted this young 
gentleman from the work of the ministry whereto his 
father had once devoted him ; and a malignant fever then 
raging in those parts of the country, carried him off with 
his wife within two or three days of one another. This 
was counted the sorest of all the trials that ever befel his 
father in the ' days of the years of his pilgrimage ; ' but he 
bore it with a patience and composure of spirit which was 
truly admirable. His dying son looked earnestly on him, 
and said, ' Sir, what shall we do V ' Whereto, with a well- 
ordered countenance, he replied, ' Look up to God ! ' And 
when he passed by his daughter, drowned in tears on this 
occasion, to her he said, ' Remember the sixth command- 
ment : hurt not yourself with immoderate grief : remember 
Job, who said, " The Lord hath given, and the Lord hath 
taken away ; blessed be the name of the Lord ! " You 
may mark what a note the Spirit of God put upon it ; u in 
all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly : " God 
accounts it a charging of Him foolishly, when we don't 
submit unto His will patiently.' Accordingly, he >*fow 



116 AMEKICAN LITEEATUEE 

governed himself as one that had attained unto the rule of 
* weeping as if we wept not ; ' for it being the Lord's day, 
he repaired unto the church in the afternoon, as he had 
been there in the forenoon, though he was never like to see 
his dearest son alive any more in this world. And though 
before the first prayer began, a messenger came to prevent 
Mr. Davenport's praying for the sick person, who was now 
dead, yet his affectionate father altered not his course, but 
wrote after the preacher as formerly ; and when he came 
home he held on his former methods of divine worship in 
his family, not for the excuse of Aaron, omitting anything 
in the service of God. In like sort, when the people had 
been at the solemn interment of this his worthy son, he 
did with a very unpassionate aspect and carriage then say, 
1 Friends, I thank you all for your love and help, and for 
this testimony of respect unto me and mine : the Lord hath 
given, and the Lord hath taken : blessed be the name of the 
Lord ! ' Nevertheless, retiring hereupon into the chamber 
where his daughter then lay sick, some tears were observed 
falling from him while he uttered these words, ' There is 
a difference between a sullen silence or a stupid senseless- 
ness under the hand of God, and a child-like submission 
thereunto. ' 

"Thus continually he, for about a score of years, was 
the glory and p Mar of New Haven colony. He would often 
say, ' Some count it a great matter to die well, but I am 
sure 'tis a great matter to live well. All our care should 
be while we have life to use it well, and so when death 
puts an end unto that, it will put an end unto all our cares.' 
But having excellently managed his care to live well, God 
would have him to die well, without any room or time then 
given him to take any care at all ; for he enjoyed a death 
sudden to every one but himself ! Having worshipped God 
with his family after his usual manner, and upon some 
occasion charged all the family to carry it well unto their 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 117 

mistress who was now confined by sickness, he sapped, and 
then took a turn or two abroad for his meditations. After 
that he came in to bid his wife good-night, before he left 
her with her watchers ; which when he did, she said, 
1 Methinks you look sad ! ' Whereto he replied, ' The 
differences risen in the church of Hartford make me so ; ' 
she then added, 4 Let us even go back to our native 
country again ; ' to which he answered, l You may (and so 
she did), but I shall die here. 7 This was the last word 
that ever she heard him speak ; for now retiring unto his 
lodging in another chamber, he was overheard about mid- 
night fetching a groan ; and unto one sent in presently to 
enquire how he did, he answered the enquiry with only 
saying, 4 Very ill ! ' and without saying any more, he fell 
1 asleep in Jesus, 7 in the year 1657, loosing anchor from 
New Haven for the better." 

A shorter extract could hardly give the full 
effect of this typical Puritan story. It is very 
foreign to our present ways of thought and 
speech. Perhaps it deserves all the epithets 
posterity unthinkingly gives it — godly, narrow, 
dull, dreary, what-not. Yet as one grows familiar 
with the literature for which it may fairly stand 
representative, one finds in it more and more not 
only a certain half-scriptural charm of style, but a 
genuinely interesting record of human experience. 
A strangely tense life it shows us, dull and trivial 
externally, commonplace in phrase, but in its es- 
sence intensely idealistic. This Theophilus Eaton 
is a man to whom the real things are the things 
unseen, to whom things seen are only passing 



118 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

shows. These passing shows, moreover, are of a 
very simple kind, because they were passing not 
in Crom well's populous England but in a colony 
where, after all, nothing was yet actually more im- 
portant than what went on of a Sunday at church. 
Cotton Mather, the writer of this story, lived two 
generations later ; his life, in fact, was spent in 
fruitless efforts to maintain the principles that his 
"Magnaria" records — chief among which was the 
political supremacy of the clergy, which in Eaton's 
time had seemed assured. Cotton Mather lived so 
late that in his prime he sent a letter to the Spec- 
tator, or at least planned to send one, for there is 
no record of its reception. When he wrote this 
life of Eaton, Dry den's work was almost finished. 
This contrast is what most impresses one, in 
the literary aspect of his narrative. The style has 
dignity, character, a fine rhythm of its own ; no 
other could tell quite so well the story of what 
emigrant Puritanism meant. But in England 
| such a style was obsolete. The u Magnalia " was 
published in the Eighteenth Century ; body and 
soul it is a book of the Seventeenth. That sen- 
tence tells the whole story. Remote from the 
great world, the American colonies preserved, in 
somewhat fading colours, traditions that England 
had outgrown. We cannot assert that either in 
thought or in phrase they actually added to the 
literature of our language anything which that 
literature did not already possess. 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 119 

VII 

For Puritanism, which is all that the earlier 
literature of America voices, had exponents 
enough and to spare in England itself. The 
course of Puritanism in America, however, dif- 
fered from its course in the mother country. 
There, its dominant power was short. The system 
of Calvin, to be sure, states the problems of life 
with a fidelity that to-day surprises any stranger 
who has known the system only by distorted 
tradition, or by verbal dogmas which time has 
stripped of their vital meaning even for those who 
utter them. Beneath it lies a profound, lasting 
sense of the actual evils which life, by inexorable 
law, is bound to develop in any dense population. 
What Calvinism regarded as evidence of the to- 
tal depravity of man, indeed, is very like what 
modern science calls the struggle for existence. 
"What it regarded as evidence for the doctrine of 
election is very like what people have in mind 
nowadays when they talk about the survival of 
the fittest. Such a struggle for such survival 
involves a good many problems, material and 
spiritual. These Calvinism states admirably ; 
but it is one thing to state problems and an- 
other to solve them. The solution which Calvin- 
ism offers is not one, apparently, which — true or 
false — any dense, active population can be in- 
duced, for any length of time, to accept. In 



120 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

England the facts on which the dogmas of Pu- 
ritanism were based remained ; and the solution 
which Puritanism offered broke down. In Amer- 
ica, almost to our own time, the facts have been 
greatly relaxed ; and the Oalvinistic solution re- 
mained for generations as a dogmatic system, 
nominally dominant, but really losing itself more 
and more in such intricacies of logical abstrac- 
tion as men will generally weave for themselves 
when stern fact does not check them. 

While the forgotten theologians of our first 
century were thus making the logic whose ulti- 
mate monument is the " One-Hoss Shay," the 
social and political facts of American history, as 
we have seen, were pretty steadily developing 
themselves in the direction of an ideal whose 
name still remains, perhaps, the most instinctive- 
ly inspiring to American ears — the ideal of inde- 
pendence. Socially, men were discovering that, 
if they neglected the theoretical principles of the 
fathers, and adhered only to the practical principle 
of insisting upon managing their affairs in their 
own way, they could so manage their affairs as to 
make themselves in the end a good deal better 
off than they were in the beginning. They were 
really started on that road to fortune-making 
which in our own time they have travelled so far 
as gravely to disturb some of our contemporaries 
who lag behind in the race. Politically, at the 
same time, they were discovering that small, 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 121 

homogeneous communities can really manage 
their public business much better than anybody 
else can manage it for them ; and what is more, 
that whether they can or not, there was at that 
period no choice. Whence, by and by, common 
sense began apparently to confirm sundry vague 
notions of the divine rights of liberty and equality 
which the experience of our heterogeneous and 
overgrown communities makes some people at 
present think less axiomatic than of old. Mean- 
while, it was evident to whoever calmly observed 
American human nature under these conditions, 
that while by no means celestial in perfection, it 
very generally developed traits which did not 
seem necessarily damnable. Theology, in fact, 
originally based on actual experience, was insen- 
sibly separating itself from experience ; and ex- 
perience was reaching fresh, unformulated con- 
clusions of its own. 

Hastily as we have considered these lines of 
thought, we have perhaps seen enough to account 
for the two Americans of the Eighteenth Century 
whose names most certainly survive in the history 
of American literature, — the two whose thought 
was most surely earnest enough, and whose phrase 
apt enough, to be read still. These are Jona- 
than Edwards and Benjamin Franklin. In the 
passionate effort of Edwards to revive the pristine 
force of orthodox Calvinism, the theology of the 
fathers reached the highest point. It was sincere, 



122 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

it was terribly earnest, it was almost impregnably 
logical ; but it was so highly developed that even 
though we knew nothing of its circumstances we 
might shrewdly guess it to be, like so many great 
works of art, essentially a thing of the past. In 
point of fact, we know its circumstances. What it 
thought the innate depravity of human nature had 
so flourished along with it that Edwards preached 
and wrote to a world where year by year there 
were more and more men who felt in their bones 
that after all this was not so. In that very world, 
too, the cool common-sense that has made on the 
whole inefficient the later efforts of Calvinistic 
logic was voiced by " Poor Richard," and by that 
sturdy practical life of Franklin's whose self- 
written record remains among the best narratives 
of personal experience in the English language. 

In the English language, we must remember, — 
the English language that is ours. Edwards and 
Franklin are surely figures that we may call our 
own. Almost as surely, though, they are figures 
that English literature may equally claim. In 
both thought and phrase they may have added 
a little to what English literature already pos- 
sessed. It would be overbold, however, confi- 
dently to assert that either added anything more 
significant than an indication of how English 
human nature develops itself in a world where 
there is still room enough for every man to move 
freely. 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 123 

VIII 

Fkanklin, however, is far more than a merely- 
literary figure. It is the tradition of his life that 
has survived rather than any wide knowledge of 
what he wrote. No figure in our history is more 
generally remembered, nor any more deservedly ; 
for whatever his merits on a moral scale, the man 
was in his life first, last, and always an American. 
Shrewd common-sense never had a more palpable 
incarnation ; nor that peculiar, ever-present, not 
needlessly obtrusive personal independence which 
so generally makes a native Yankee, wherever he 
goes, a troublesome match for people who assume 
to be his betters. Himself, then, we remember 
first ; and if we are suddenly asked what he was 
besides being himself, our impulse would be in 
conveniently general terms to answer that he was 
a statesman and a philosopher. 

In this double character, more than in any- 
thing lie actually said or wrote, Franklin typi- 
fies something beyond the rational spirit of his 
own time, which put an end in America to the 
dominance of theological logic. From that time 
to ours the most serious expressions of Ameri- 
can thought have been either political or philo- 
sophic. Before we consider, then, those later 
phases of American literature whose purpose is 
more purely artistic, we may conveniently re- 
mind ourselves first of the political literature, 



124 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

then of the philosophic, and finally of the pecul- 
iar fusion of the two that precede and surround 
them. 

IX 

From the middle of the Eighteenth Century to 
a time that we ourselves can remember, American 
public men produced a pretty steady flow of ora- 
tory. The standard speakers that, very possibly, 
are still among the most thumbed text-books of 
secondary schools, have made a good deal of this 
eloquence household words. From Patrick Henry 
and Otis to Daniel Webster and the dozens of 
lesser men who surrounded him, we are familiar 
with endless declamations which voice with vary- 
ing merit the patriotic enthusiasm and vagaries 
of American independence. Much of this, at 
least to us of America, seems really fine and stir- 
ring ; much of it, at least to some of us, is begin- 
ning to seem rather sonorous than significant. Ul- 
timately true, though, or ultimately empty, it cer- 
tainly phrases, with spontaneous enthusiasm, the 
thoughts and emotions which at critical moments 
have been the vital forces of our national history ; 
and these thoughts and emotions, when we con- 
sider them coolly, appear to be just such as we 
should expect to arise among the conditions of life 
that we have considered. The dominant ideals 
that run through all this eloquence are the ideals 
of law and of right. These are not very clearly 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 125 

distinguished. In general, there seems to be an 
underlying feeling that if by any chance they are 
not identical they ought to be, and therefore will 
be. Anyhow, we ought all to be law-abiding, and 
all to be moral, and all to be at liberty to think 
and to behave as we choose within the obvious 
limits of law and morals. And what we ought to 
be we mean to be ; and that is American. So, be- 
ing Americans, we are, generally speaking, pretty 
much what we ought to be. Incidentally, then, 
we are always in the right ; and whoever disagrees 
with us is consequently and obviously wrong, and 
ought to be made to understand it. 

In this summary of the ultimate impression pro- 
duced by the patriotic eloquence of our country 
there is perhaps a suggestion of caricature ; for 
the summary certainly neglects the most admira- 
ble emotional trait of the eloquence in question, 
— the sincerity, the enthusiasm, the tremendous 
motive power of such convictions as it phrases. 
In less critical moods one finds this enthusi- 
asm heroically contagious ; this eloquence really 
seems to voice the meaning of life. If we ask 
ourselves, however, what phase of the meaning 
of life it lastingly voices our answer seems in- 
evitable : very clearly it is a phase of human ex- 
perience where for a while the troublesome press- 
ure of external fact is blessedly relaxed. 

In a society so simple as ours used to be, one 
man is really about as good as another. The ex- 



126 AMEKIOAN LITEKATUEE 

perience of the generations that preceded the 
American Kevolution, one may almost say of the 
generations that preceded the American Civil War, 
had confirmed those inspiring doctrines of human 
equality and fraternity which in reality we learned 
rather from the philosophical vagaries of Eigh- 
teenth-Century France than from the practical ex- 
perience we inherit from law-abiding England. 
Our actual conduct was generally based on the 
sound old English traditions ; our words and our 
thoughts "were, more than we have generally real- 
ized, borrowed from the cloud-spun theories of 
clever Frenchmen. We have never yet dreamed 
that our conduct and our speech do not agree ; 
and at the period we are now considering — the 
period that gave rise to the great century of 
American oratory — the theories that our oratory 
uttered actually came far nearer to correspond- 
ence with fact than is commonly the case in hu- 
man history. Society was not yet complex enough 
to group itself in distinct, hostile classes. The 
only men who were really dangerous were the 
men who were not law-abiding or not good. 

Here, then, one feels like saying, is at least one 
body of literature, whatever its final value, that is 
historically American. In a way it is. But turn to 
those very standard speakers in which we are most 
familiar with it. You will find there a great many 
examples of English oratory, too. Compare the 
speeches made in Parliament with the speeches 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 127 

made in Congress. You will find a difference, of 
course ; but as you read on, you can hardly escape 
a growing doubt as to whether this difference is 
essential, a difference of kind. If you were late- 
ly vexed by a perhaps unsympathetic summary 
of American eloquence, you may be consoled by 
observing how much of it might be applied to 
British eloquence, too. Less hampered by the 
pressure of material facts, less restrained by the 
presence of keen critics, our orators perhaps 
soar higher and certainly circle more widely 
than the orators of England. At heart, though, 
one must feel, they are as closely akin as they 
are in language. If our political literature has 
added anything to the political literature of 
England, we can hardly assert that it has added 
more than a demonstration of w T hat that literature 
might have been in England itself, if in England 
the constant pressure of external fact had been 
awhile relaxed. 



Such relaxation of the pressure of external fact 
as has seemed to underlie our political thought 
seems more clearly still to underlie the religious 
and the philosophical thought of the period we 
are now considering. The profound truth most 
emphasized by the Calvinistic creed of the emi- 
grant fathers was the inherent vileness of human 
nature. Men were born bad, it held, so bad that 



128 AMEEICAN LITERATUEE 

nothing they themselves could do might ever be 
enough to save them from deserved damnation. 
A few generations of native American experience 
led Americans seriously to question this view of 
human nature, and in the end to substitute for 
it one diametrically opposite. In the pure rec- 
ords of New England Unitarianism, in the unfet- 
tered philosophy of Emerson, in the half-inspired 
preaching of the late Bishop of Massachusetts, 
one cannot help feeling a sublime confidence in 
the divine possibilities that lie hidden in even the 
vilest human being. 

If we could only induce ourselves honestly to 
share this confidence, we might be swept with 
these enthusiasts to ecstatic heights. These men 
themselves were good men — wonderfully good. 
They were sympathetic men, permeated with an 
honest sense of human fraternity. Let us be our 
best, they seem to say, and all shall be well ; and 
by and by there shall be an end of evil. What 
is more, — what strengthened their faith and still 
strengthens their authority, — this noble optimism 
of theirs was nearer to the truth of human nature 
about them, for all its growing vileness, than was 
the grim pessimism of the Calvinist fathers to the 
human facts of the New World where a whole 
continent lay open to whoever had courage to 
penetrate its wilderness. It is only where life 
is dense that the struggle for existence grows 
fierce. It is only in a crowded world that we 



AMEEICAN LITEEATUKE 129 

have forced upon us, in all their horror, the last- 
ing realities of sin and evil. In a world where 
there is still room, whoever will may stand aside, 
dreaming himself like to a god ; and whoever can 
put faith in such dreams grows godlike dream- 
ing, and is a very beautiful fact to contemplate. 
Without the dreamers the world would be poor- 
er : we may all grant that. There are moods — 
and not our least precious ones — in which, for all 
our knowledge, the dreamers seem the prophets, 
revealing the things which are to be. 

In the social history of New England there is a 
petty fact which in moods like this confronts us. 
It is not unique ; none is more commonplace, 
none could have been more confidently pre- 
dicted. Like its innumerable fellows in human 
experience, though, it has a significance which at 
moments when we feel like yielding to the ec- 
stasies of optimistic enthusiasm is almost tragic. 
You must already recognize that generally comic 
experiment at Brook Farm, where a company of 
enthusiasts tried to combine plain living, high 
thinking, and the earning of a decent livelihood. 
We all know the result. They did not earn a 
decent livelihood ; they squabbled, in spite of 
the highest intellectual and moral intentions ; and 
what few were not dispersed by this state of affairs 
found plain living by itself not so intrinsically 
attractive as to prevent them from reverting each 
to the most comfortable circumstances he could 



130 AMERICAN LITERATUBE 

command. Calvinistic depravity in this little cir- 
cle took no very acute form ; it was enough, how- 
ever, to prevent successful co-operative aspira- 
tion to higher things than every- day life affords. 
Brook Farm, in short, typifies what in all likeli- 
hood must always happen to American optimists 
who try to test their optimism experimentally. 
Dreams are very noble things ; but to dream we 
must sleep ; and to get along in this actual world 
of ours we must be wide awake. 

Our business with these dreams, however, is 
not to share them for the moment, nor yet to sigh 
over their evanescence. It is to ask ourselves 
whether they have added to the dreams of Eng- 
land anything which makes richer the lasting ex- 
pression in English words of the meaning of life. 
They have doubtless added something. What this 
something is one finds it hard to say ; yet at heart 
one can hardly help feeling sure that the records 
of human purity would be poorer without the rec- 
ords which the New England dreamers have left 
us. Perhaps, as we scrutinize these dreams, their 
chief trait seems to be that they are always unfet- 
tered yet never base. Left to itself, the devout 
free thought of New England has such freedom 
from vileness as we love to call childlike. The 
dreamers of Old England have been perhaps 
more sophisticated, at all events more conscious 
of how their dreams must diverge from reality. 
In England, we remember, real fact has hardly 



AMERICAN LITEEATUEE 131 

relaxed its pressure since English literature be- 
gan. In America, as we have seen, the case has 
hitherto been different. So we find ourselves 
where we found ourselves a little while ago, when 
we were thumbing anew the leaves of our old 
standard speakers. The philosophic dreamers 
of America, we must admit, have added to Eng- 
lish literature little that might not have been 
added in England itself, if in England the press- 
ure of external fact had been awhile relaxed. 

XI 

So far we have considered these political and 
philosophic moods only as they revealed them- 
selves in mere words. We have neglected per- 
haps their chief manifestation, when for once 
they revealed themselves in triumphant action. 
In this case they not only expressed themselves ; 
they actually altered the course of human history. 
A fiery fusion of these moods, which we have 
considered apart, was what produced that great 
outburst of human sympathy which resulted in the 
abolition of African slavery. The forces which 
brought about this great result gathered them- 
selves, to no small degree, in literary form. We 
all know " Uncle Tom's Cabin ; " we all know the 
work of Whittier and of Lowell ; we all know the 
passionate intensity of Garrison, the magnificent, 
scurrilous eloquence of Phillips. Here, we may 



132 AMEEICAN LITEEATUEE 

think, is surely something peculiarly our own 
— native American enthusiasm dealing with stern 
reality, and practically asserting the eternal truth 
of humane American optimism. There is no re- 
laxed sense of fact here. 

To question this conclusion seems nowadays 
almost disloyal. Whatever our personal sympa- 
thies, no one can deny the nobly humane impulse 
which underlay even the vagaries of Abolition. 
Nor can any one deny that what only sixty years 
ago was ridiculed as humanitarian fanaticism has 
taken its place to-day among the most honoured 
traditions of the American people. Abolition 
ended what every one now admits to have been 
the monstrous evil of negro slavery. For that it 
deserves all honour. 

Were this the whole story, many of us would 
to-day feel more happily secure than we honest- 
ly can. To many who pause to think, tradition 
seems in this case, as in innumerable others, to 
be blinding the eyes of the people to stern, un- 
welcome fact. It is hiding the truth that, in the 
great days of Abolition as well as now and for- 
ever, enthusiasm lacks foresight. It is hiding 
the truth that for all their noble enthusiasm, the 
Abolitionists, after the good old British fashion, 
directed their reforming energies not against the 
evils prevalent in the actual society of which they 
formed a part ; but against those that prevailed 
in a rival society which they knew chiefly by 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 133 

hearsay. They found this society — and with it 
our whole country — cursed with the evil of slav- 
ery. They left us all burdened with another evil, 
which at times seems almost as monstrous, al- 
most as untrue to the real facts of human experi- 
ence. What has supplanted negro slavery is not 
mere freedom; it is that appalling degradation 
of American citizenship which the Abolitionists 
hailed so eagerly under the name of negro suf- 
frage. 

In this aspect we cannot so confidently assert 
that the great movement of Abolition was actu- 
ated by a very stern sense of fact. A moment 
ago, too, we had a glimpse of another aspect in 
which we may question whether, after all, Aboli- 
tion was so distinctively American as we like to 
think. In this aspect, by no means its least ob- 
vious, it becomes only one among the many symp- 
toms that prove us still of English race. At least 
in their modern history, we must remember, the 
English have displayed inexhaustible power, 
when impelled by moral motives, of meddling 
with the business of other people whose affairs 
they imperfectly understand. We find ourselves, 
in short, where we found ourselves before. Like 
the purely political and the purely philosophical 
literature that surrounds it, the literature of Abo- 
lition can hardly be asserted to add much to the 
lasting expression of the meaning of life other- 
wise embodied in English words. 



134 AMEBICAN LITEEATUEE 

XII 

We have dealt now with those kinds of liter- 
ature whose office is chiefly to affect human 
conduct. We must turn to those kinds whose 
office is chiefly to instruct or to delight — to the 
literature, in short, that we had in mind when at 
the beginning of this discussion we first thought 
of the six worthies of New England. With this 
we shall have to deal even more summarily than 
with what we have considered before. We may 
justify ourselves by the thought that while the 
literature we have touched on is perhaps known 
chiefly to students, the literature now before us 
is the literature still most familiar to the Amer- 
ican people — the literature, in short, that is sure to 
be found in any native library, public or private. 

A few words, then, of our historians ; after 
that, of our purely literary figures ; and we shall 
have done. 

XIII 

Boston has been the home of historians who 
may fairly be treated with high respect. One 
need not name them all, nor need one specifi- 
cally say that the school for which they stand is 
not confined to Boston. Once for all, one may 
affirm that Prescott, and Motley, and the rest, are 
writers of real industry and real power. Accord- 
ing to the methods of their time — a time that 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 135 

preceded the microscopic accuracy of the schol- 
arship now most in vogue — they collected their 
material with diligence and care ; and according 
to the pleasantly polite fashion then still prevalent 
they expressed the results of this labour in a style 
that, despite occasional formality, is permanently 
pleasant to read. What they did, they did well. 
They have given us books that should lastingly 
hold places in the long list of historical literature 
that dignifies English prose. So much every 
one must admit ; and it would be a pleasure to 
dwell long on this honourable achievement. 

Our business with these men, however, is 
only to inquire whether they have added to Eng- 
lish literature anything essentially different, in 
thought or in phrase, from what that literature 
would otherwise comprise; in other words, 
whether they have done work that permanently 
enhances our conception of what historical lit- 
erature may be. By itself their work is surely 
admirable ; but we cannot consider it only by 
itself. It must take its place in a literature 
which, to go no further, comprises without it the 
work of Gibbon, of Hume, of Macaulay, of Carlyle. 
These names are enough. Admire our own his- 
torians as we may, we can claim for them no 
higher merit than that of having added their 
romantic tales to the already rich store of ro- 
mantic narrative which without them our lan- 
guage possesses. 



136 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

XIV 

The word romantic is not very precise. Among 
a dozen meanings, however, it suggests chiefly, 
perhaps, a fondness for contemplating things not 
as they are in our actual life, but rather as they 
might have been in a dreamy past, or as they 
might be in some far-off present or fantastic 
future. No phase of romantic feeling is more 
constant than that which delights in traditions of 
things remote in time or in space — if so may be 
in both. These we may dream of as better, more 
beautiful, more stirring than the trivialities we 
know about us. We all know this spirit in the 
curious petty form which makes native Yankees 
such minute genealogists ; in that more serious 
form, too, which makes foreign missions so much 
more popular than domestic. It was a phase of 
this spirit, delighting to revive the grandeurs of a 
vanished time, that impelled Irving, and Ticknor, 
and Prescott, and Motley to live so much of their 
inner lives rather among the splendours of Renas- 
cent Spain than among the respectable democ- 
racy of the United States. 

In this aspect the American historians resem- 
ble the other American writers whose literary 
purpose has been more purely artistic. The 
dominant note in the work of almost all of these 
may be called romantic. It was a phase of the 
romantic spirit that impelled Irving again, and 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 137 

Longfellow, and Lowell, and at times even Whit- 
tier, to saturate themselves in the delights of, 
great European literature ; and to phrase this ex- 
perience in terms that, however modern fashion 
may sometimes slight them, have made romantic 
dreams the lasting possession of American youth. 
To no European, indeed, can Europe, with its 
limitless past, be quite so stirring as to a native 
of this New World, in whom a starved romantic 
spirit is lurking ; and nothing has more helped 
us to this keenest, purest kind of pleasure than 
our romantic historians, and poets, and novelists. 
Whoever does not love and enjoy them must be 
inappreciative or ungrateful. 

They have done us, then, a great service — a 
service on which it would be pleasant to dwell 
long. Here, however, we have no time for eulogy. 
The question before us is simply whether they 
have made English literature more widely, last- 
ingly expressive than it would have been with- 
out them. In all frankness we can hardly as- 
sert that on the whole they have. Without them 
English literature possesses records enough and 
to spare that show what the romantic spirit is. 
These records, as well as our own, must be in 
mind whenever we attempt, as we attempted a 
moment ago, to define this spirit. The defini- 
tion was unhappily crude and vague. It was 
enough, though, to fix one fact : in essence the 
romantic spirit is dreamy, and like a true dream 



138 AMEKICAN LITEBATUKE 

flourishes best when the pressure of external fact 
is deliberately or accidentally relaxed. The dif- 
ference between our romantic literature and the 
romantic literature of Europe is not great ; it lies 
chiefly, perhaps, in the fact that, with perceptibly 
less intensity and power, ours is less conscious, 
more spontaneous. As we consider our romantic 
writers coolly, in short, they generally reveal 
themselves just as English-speaking men, hap- 
pily resident in a world where troublesome fact 
presses more lightly than in England. 

XV 

Among them, however, there are two, very un- 
like each other, who are similar in being dis- 
tinctly different from any writers whom we can 
feel to be characteristically English. These are 
Poe and Hawthorne. 

Poe, to be sure, is fantastic and meretricious 
throughout. In his work as in his life he was 
haunted by the vices and the falsity of the stage 
that bred him ; but he was really haunted. As 
one knows him better, one does not love him 
more. In another way, though, one grows to 
care for him, or at least to pity him. For with all 
his falsity, with all his impudence and sham, the 
man is a man by himself. There is something 
freakish, not quite earthly, wholly his own in the 
fancies and the cadences that grow wild amid his 



AMEEICAN LITERATURE 139 

work. If it be something to have added a new 
note to literature, then we Americans must re- 
spect the memory of Poe. 

With Hawthorne, the case is very different. 
To men of our time, beyond doubt, his work 
seems generally not fantastic but imaginative, 
and surely not meretricious but in its own way 
beautiful. Nor is this the whole story : almost 
alone among our writers, we may say, Hawthorne 
has a lasting native significance. For this there 
are surely two good reasons. In the first place, 
he is almost the solitary American artist who has 
phrased his meaning in words of which the beauty 
seems sure to grow with the years. In the sec- 
ond place, what marks him as most impregnably 
American is this : when we look close to see 
what his meaning really was, we find it a thing 
that in the old days, at last finally dead and gone, 
had been the great motive power of his race. 
What Hawthorne really voices is that strange, 
morbid, haunting sense of other things that we 
see or hear, which underlay the intense idealism 
of the emigrant Puritans, and which remains per- 
haps the most inalienable emotional heritage of 
their children. It is Hawthorne, in brief, who 
finally phrases the meaning of such a life as The- 
ophilus Eaton lived and Cotton Mather recorded. 

Hawthorne and Poe, then, have added some- 
thing, in both thought and phrase, to the litera- 
ture of England. Yet when we ask ourselves 



140 AMEEIOAN LITERATURE 

coolly just what this something is, we need not 
be surprised to find no very new answer. In the 
half-mad vagaries of the one, and in the melan- 
choly musings of the other, we can feel, to be 
sure, at least emotions that we should have far 
to seek elsewhere. In the very extravagance of 
their freedom, however, these emotions bring us 
back to where we have so often found ourselves 
before. They are surely such as we should ex- 
pect dreamy, imaginative, English-speaking folks 
to know, when their lot is cast in a still un- 
crowded world. For all this, though, Poe and 
Hawthorne are in no wise Englishmen. What- 
ever they express, it is surely something of their 
own, and so of ours. 

XVI 

Something of our own, too, is expressed by the 
kind of literature that foreigners are apt to think 
most characteristically American. This is the 
sort of thing that is called American humour. In 
trivial forms it pervades the newspapers. Its 
vulgar heroes are Artemas Ward and Josh Bill- 
ings. Its masterpieces are probably to be found 
in Irving's " Knickerbocker," and in the works 
of Lowell, and of the last survivor of the best 
days of New England letters — Dr. Holmes. 

One can hardly define American humour, but 
we all know what it is. It is based on shrewd, 
cool, good-tempered common-sense ; it has serene 



AMEEICAN LITEEATUBE 141 

assurance, it has great freshness of feeling. One 
likes it, one laughs at it, and above all one feels 
it generally spontaneous and wholesome. It 
leaves no bitterness behind. Somehow, though, 
it is not profound humour, not great ; it is apt to 
have less serious relation to life than at first 
glance seems the case. With all its fresh charm, 
all its wholesome humanity, its final trait seems, 
broadly speaking, to be good-natured, reckless 
extravagance of both thought and phrase. This 
extravagance, if it be really the chief trait of our 
humour, marks even this most characteristic 
phase of our national literature as expressing 
only another aspect of the same experience that 
we have found so generally to underlie what we, 
as a people, have thought, and felt, and said. 
At bottom, after all, extravagance is only another 
name for cheerful neglect of stern reality. It is 
another and a brighter expression of what men 
know and feel when external fact does not press 
them too hard. 

XYII 

So much for the American literature of the 
past. This is not the place to deal with the 
present or the future. In the period we have con- 
sidered, almost every writer has been concerned 
either with what had gone before him or with 
what was passing about him. Almost all, in 
short, have expressed what we have seen to be 



142 AMERICAN LITERATURE 

the historical experience of American life— the 
manner of the free growth of an English people 
in a world where there was still plenty of room. 

In this same period, however, there is a single 
figure who seems steadily and constantly to face 
not what is now past, but what is now present or 
to come. Though his right fco respect is ques- 
tioned oftenest of all, we cannot fairly pass Walt 
Whitman without mention. He lacks, of course, 
to a grotesque degree, artistic form ; but that 
very lack is characteristic. Artistic form, as we 
have seen, is often the final stamp that marks 
human expression as a thing of the past. Whit- 
man remarkably illustrates this principle : he 
lacks form chiefly because he is stammeringly 
overpowered by his bewildering vision of what he 
believes to be the future. He is uncouth, inar- 
ticulate, whatever you please that is least ortho- 
dox ; yet, after all, he can make you feel for the 
moment how even the ferry-boats plying from 
New York to Brooklyn are fragments of God's 
eternities. Those of us who love the past are 
far from sharing his confidence in the future. 
Surely, however, that is no reason for denying 
the miracle that he has wrought by idealizing the 
East River. The man who has done this is the 
only one who points out the stuff of which per- 
haps the new American literature of the future 
may in time be made, who foreruns perhaps a 
spirit that may inspire that literature, if it grow 



AMEKIOAN LITEKATUKE US 

at last into an organic form of its own, with a 
meaning not to be sought in other worlds than 
this western world of ours. 



XVIII 

Brief and hasty as this sketch has had to be, 
few as are the aspects of our life and our letters 
on which we have had time to touch, it has per- 
haps been enough to indicate what some of us 
have meant when in careless phrase we have some- 
times said that America has no literature at all. 
What we really mean is only that while Ameri- 
cans have added something to the lasting expres- 
sions of the meaning of life that are phrased in 
English words, they are still far from having 
added enough to justify a valid claim to an inde- 
pendent place among those peoples whose na- 
tional literatures are inevitably lasting posses- 
sions of humanity. New England, in its own 
little way, has voiced the experience of English 
humanity free for awhile from the stern pressure 
of external fact. That is almost all. 

Nor can I feel that we have erred, while con-, 
sidering American literature, in attending chiefly 
to that New England which to me is the spot on 
earth where life means most. In America, I 
believe, only New England has expressed itself 
in a literary form which inevitably commands 
attention from whoever pursues such inquiries 



144 AMEKICAN LITEKATUKE 

as ours. What else has been written in the pe- 
riods of American life that we have consid- 
ered may almost certainly be brought within 
generalizations based on the literature of New 
England. In this fact a New Englander feels 
a pride deeper than I realized when I began to 
write these lines ; yet he feels, too, a sadness. 
By the inexorable law on which we have touched 
more than once, the very fact that New England 
has actually expressed its unfettered experience 
seems to mean that the unfettered experience of 
New England, and all the New England that we 
have known and cared for, is past or passing. 

Yet after all, much as we may love it, even that 
unfettered New England is not the ultimate fact 
of human history. It is hard to avoid the con- 
viction that this very New England we love so 
well has youthfully overestimated herself and her 
work. In endeavouring not unduly to praise this 
work, then, many of us perhaps err the other 
way. So far as it goes, this work is sound and 
wholesome. What the six worthies with whose 
names we began this discussion have contributed 
to lasting literature is no great thing, to be sure ; 
but it is something. Something better still is 
the great purity of their lives. Emasculate we 
may call them in certain moods. In other moods, 
and better, their lives tell us that if restraint be 
relaxed what will flourish most in English human 
nature is not the evil ; and whatever else, great 



AMERICAN LITERATURE 145 

or little, their works tell us, they tell us nothing 
sordid, base, impure. As the struggling years 
of the future come upon us, we shall value this 
purity more and more. In the past many of us 
have looked at these men with irreverent impa- 
tience. What have they done, after all, we have 
asked, that we should so trouble ourselves about 
them. But now, as the years are passing, we ask 
ourselves such questions less and less. Rather 
we look at these men with growing love and 
veneration. For the little group is a group that 
we should have far to seek elsewhere. Of each 
one may be said the truest and the loveliest thing 
that has been said of Longfellow— and no man 
could wish a worthier epitaph : 

" He left his native air the sweeter for his song." 
10 



VI 
JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEE 



(A Memoir presented to the American Academy of Arts 
and Sciences, on June 14, 1893.) 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER 



John Greenleaf Whittier was born in Haver- 
hill, Massachusetts, on December 17, 1807.* His 
ancestors, in every line of the soundest Yankee 
stock, had resided from the earliest times in Es- 
sex County, or in the older regions of New Hamp- 
shire. The house in which he was born had been 
built by his emigrant ancestor, Thomas Whittier, 
who died at the age of seventy-six, in 1696, after 
above fifty years' residence in New England. In 
1694, Joseph Whittier, son of the emigrant, and 
great-grandfather of the poet, had married the 
daughter of a well-known Quaker. Probably 
from this time the immediate family of the poet 
had belonged to the Eeligious Society of Friends. 
In all other respects their condition had been 
that of substantial New England farmers. 

Amid the extreme diversity of religious views 
that marks our own time, and the efforts now so 
general among the New England clergy to em- 
phasize the few things that religious people be- 

* For the facts of Whittier 1 s life I rely chiefly on the 
biography by Mr. F. H. Underwood. 



150 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 

lieve in common, and to neglect the many con- 
cerning which they radically differ, we are apt to 
think of religious divergences as verbal or for- 
mal. In general we are probably right. Modern 
Yankees, at all events, are not profound theolo- 
gians. They are disposed either to take religion 
as they find it, or else without much ado to se- 
lect in place of their ancestral faith some creed 
or form of worship which they find socially or 
aesthetically more congenial. Sectarian differ- 
ences nowadays certainly do not display them- 
selves in obvious differences of character. With 
people of ordinary parts, of course, this has gen- 
erally been the case at all times ; with really 
serious natures the case is different. The few 
people in any generation who seem instinctively 
aware of the tremendous seriousness of religion — 
the people whose presence in this world was per- 
haps the chief basis of the Calvinistic doctrine 
of election — are inevitably affected, often perma- 
mently, by the religious doctrine that surrounds 
their early years. Whatever else Whittier was, 
he was a profoundly religious man, who could not 
help taking life in earnest. To understand him 
at all, then, we must know something of the 
peculiar religious views which he never relin- 
quished. 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 151 

II 

The Friends in New England, writes a gentle- 
man who is now an earnest member of the Relig- 
ious Society in question, 

u were Orthodox in that they believed in God as Father, 
Son, and Holy Spirit, in Christ as truly one with the 
Father, yet also very man, and in the efficacy of His 
atonement for the forgiveness of sins. But the term k Or- 
thodox' in New England is usually taken to mean the 
tenets of the Westminster Confession. Whittier was 
trained to regard the extreme views of this Confession 
with aversion. He drank in the truth of the universal 
love of God to all men in Christian, Jewish, or Pagan 
lands, that God so loved the world that He sent His Son, 
that Christ died for all men, and His atonement availed 
for all who in every land accepted the light with which He 
enlightened their minds and consciences, and who listen- 
ing to His still small voice in the soul turned in any true 
sense toward God, away from evil and to the right and 
loving. Whittier thus drank in a spirit of universal love, 
a sense of oneness with all men, that fitted him to espouse 
and advocate the cause of the ignorant, the weak, the out- 
cast — the slave, the Indian, the heathen. It gave him sym- 
pathy with all loving, saintly souls like Fenelon, Guion, 
and other Roman Catholics of like spirit, and nerved 
his manly, indignant scorn of hard and cruel men that 
professed the name of 4 Christian.' Whittier was trained 
to have a great reverence for the Bible. . . . He had 
read much in the Journals of Friends. He had steeped 
his mind with their thoughts and loved them because they 
were so saintly and yet so humbly unconscious of it. 

" The title l Quaker Poet ' is a true one, not simply be- 



152 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 

cause he was a Friend by membership, but because he 
was permeated by the spirit of Quaker Christianity. It 
is true that Whittier was much broadened by association 
with men like Emerson, Longfellow, and others, Garrison 
especially ; but he was to the end a Friend in his religion." 

The letter from which these passages are quoted 
was addressed to a kinswoman of Whit tier's, 
who has kindly sent me some notes of her own 
recollections of Friends. Though some years 
younger than he, she was trained under similar 
influences. Her recollections, then, we may guess 
in some degree to have blended with his. 

u During the early part of this century," she writes, 
" I think the Society of Friends throughout the rural dis- 
tricts of New England retained in a great measure the 
stern, rigid simplicity and exclusiveness which character- 
ized the religious people of the old Puritan days. They were 
thoroughly Orthodox,* and gave little heed to the Unita- 
rian controversy among others. . . , Friends then had 
not, I think, all the aggressive fervor of the earlier days ; 
there was a degree of lukewarmness ; but they had among 
them many ministers,t untrained in the learning of the 
world, but full of spiritual life, who laboured not only 
among Friends, but wherever they felt themselves called. 

lt The Discipline of the Society was rigidly observed by 
most. Queries were answered Quarterly, and looked after 
by appointed Committee. I will give some of the Queries, 

* i.e., Trinitarian Christians, but not Calvinists. 
t Among the Friends in general, men and women may 
alike be ministers ; but a minister may receive no salary. 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 153 

as they undoubtedly exerted some influence over the 
children, who often listened to them : 

M Are meetings for worship duly attended ? hour* ob- 
served ? Are they preserved from sleeping or other un- 
becoming behavior ? 

" Are the Holy Scriptures frequently read ? 

"Do [Friends] avoid spirituous liquors except for Medi- 
cine ? 

"Do they avoid unnecessary frequenting of taverns or 
other places of public resort ? 

" Are the poor looked after, and assisted in such business 
as they are capable of ? 

"Are [Friends] careful to inspect their affairs, punctual 
in promises ? 

"Do they live within the bounds of their income ? 

"Do they deal with offenders in the Spirit of Meekness ? 
etc., etc. 

" The children of Friends were early taught that there 
was a still small voice given them by their Heavenly 
Father which could tell them when they were doing 
wrong, f 

"In most cases they were taken regularly to meetings 
for Worship — often to those for Discipline — where they had 
to sit still on hard benches. They had no Sabbath-schools, 
but in almost all families on First Day afternoon the chil- 
dren were required to listen to readings in the Holy Script- 
ures and they were generally well informed in all Bible 
History. When Whittier was a little boy he once re- 
marked he thought David could not have been a Friend, as 
he was a man of war. 

* i. e. If no one feels called to speak, do they regularly 
wait for at least one hour in silence V 

t This doctrine of universal conscience seems the funda- 
mental one of the Society of Friends. 



154 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

"Music and dancing were not indulged in. Novels 
were forbidden. But they all the more enjoyed Milton, 
Young, Cowper, and histories when obtainable. It seems 
Whittier had none of these, at which I marvel, as his 
grandmother, who lived with them, was a Greenleaf , and 
they were literary people." 

Without actually quoting these notes, so kind- 
ly sent me, I could hardly have reproduced the 
effect they make on one who carefully reads them. 
To restate in one's own words the earnest faith 
they so tenderly express seems unsympathetic. 
In more worldly phrase than theirs, however, what 
Whittier was taught and believed seems to have 
been this : To all human beings God has given 
an inner light, to all He speaks with a still small 
voice. Follow the light, obey the voice, and all 
will be well. Evil-doers are they who neglect 
the light and the voice. Now the light and the 
voice are God's, so to all who will attend they 
must ultimately show the same truth. If the 
voice call us to correct others, then, or the light 
shine upon manifest evil, it is God's will that we 
smite error, if so may be by revealing truth. If 
those who err be Friends, our duty bids us ex- 
postulate with them ; and if they be obdurate, to 
present them for discipline, which may result in 
their exclusion from our Eeligious Society. The 
still small voice, it seems, really warns everybody 
that certain lines of conduct are essentially wrong 
— among which are the drinking of spirits, the 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 155 

frequenting of taverns, indulgence in gaming, the 
use of oaths, and the enslavement of any human 
being. 

Ill 

In this firm faith, fortified from Scripture, that 
everybody really knows right from wrong, that 
many common lines of conduct are indubitably 
wrong, and that whoever follow such lines of 
conduct do so from wilful neglect of the inner 
light and the still small voice divinely vouchsafed 
them, Whittier was trained and lived. To this 
faith, involving the essential equality of all 
mankind, and the deliberate ungodliness of who- 
ever by word or deed fails to recognize this 
equality, may be traced many of the peculiar 
characteristics which make him, even to those who 
mistrust the reforms in which he so passionately 
engaged himself, perhaps the least irritating of 
reformers. Not only was he trained from in- 
fancy in this faith, of which reform is the only 
logical expression in action ; but his life from 
beginning to end was singularly remote from that 
heart-breaking experience of actual fact, in crowd- 
ed and growing communities, which goes so far 
nowadays to disprove, for whoever will frankly 
recognize what is before him, the essential vital- 
ity of those parts of human nature which are best. 

A barefoot boy to look at, an unswerving be- 
liever at heart in the inner light of the Friends, 



156 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 

and by nature one of those calmly passionate 
Yankees who cannot help taking life in earnest, 
he grew up in days when the New England 
country was still pure in the possession of an un- 
mixed race whose power of self-government has 
never been surpassed. His " Snow-Bound " re- 
lates his own memories of childhood ; some of the 
sketches preserved in his prose works * add pleas- 
ant touches to the better-known pictures in his 
verse. He always had a hankering for literature. 
A strolling Scotch vagrant, hospitably treated to 
cheese and cider, sang him in payment some 
songs of Burns. At fourteen he laid hands on a 
copy of Burns's poems. These seem to have start- 
ed him at writing. At seventeen he had written 
a poem on the " Exile's Departure" from the 
" shores of Hibernia,"f which in 1826 found its 
way into print in the Newburyport Free Press, 
then edited by William Lloyd Garrison. From 
1827 to 1892 he passed no year without writing 
verses which sooner or later came to publication. 
In 1826, before he was nineteen years old, he 
was visited while at work in the corn-field by Gar- 
rison, the young editor, who had been struck by 
the merit of his verses. The friendship thus be- 

* Notably "Yankee Gypsies," and " Magicians and 
Witch Folk, " Prose Works, i., 326, 399. 

t Poetical Works, iv. , 333. This poem, like that on the 
' ' Vale of the Merrimac " cited below, which belongs to the 
same year, suggests the influence of Moore. 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 157 

gun proved life -long. Had anything been needed 
to enhance the reformatory instincts of a Yankee 
Quaker, the chance that this first literary recog- 
nition came from the man destined to be the most 
strenuous reformer of his time would have been 
enough. 

In his twentieth year Whittier went to the 
Academy in Haverhill, where he spent two terms, 
and particularly distinguished himself in English 
composition. During a winter vacation he taught 
a country school. At twenty-one he was already 
a professional writer for some of the smaller 
newspapers. At twenty-three he was editor of 
the Haverhill Gazette ; and before he was twenty- 
four he was made editor of the New England 
Weekly Review, a paper published at Hartford, 
Connecticut. At the end of a year and a half he 
resigned this office, on the ground of ill-health, 
and returned to Massachusetts. Meanwhile he 
had published a small volume of " New England 
Legends." 

At this time Garrison had just established the 
Liberator in Boston. The movement for the abo- 
lition of slavery was fairly begun. Into this 
movement Whittier threw himself with all his 
might. For thirty years he constantly advocated 
it in both prose and verse. He was a member of 
the Anti-Slavery Convention at Philadelphia, in 
1833. * He was attacked by a mob at Haverhill in 

* See his vivid reminiscences of it ; Prose Works, iii. , 171 . 



158 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 

1834 ; and by a worse one at Concord, New Hamp- 
shire, in 1835. In this year he was for one term 
a member of the General Court of Massachusetts. 
In 1837 he went to New York, as a secretary of 
the National Anti-Slavery Society. Early in 1838 
he was made editor of the Pennsylvania Freeman, 
a journal devoted to the cause of abolition, pub- 
lished at Philadelphia. In May, 1838, the office 
of this paper, together with Pennsylvania Hall, 
just erected for the purpose of providing the 
Abolitionists with a regular place of meeting, 
was burned by a mob. In 1840 he resigned his 
charge of the Freeman, and rejoined his mother 
and sister, who had moved to Amesbury, Massa- 
chusetts. Here henceforth was his legal resi- 
dence. 

From this time on, his life was remarkably un- 
eventful. Shy in temperament, and generally 
troubled by that sort of robust poor health which 
frequently accompanies total abstinence, he lived 
secluded in the Yankee country for the better 
part of fifty-two years. He wrote a great deal ; 
but rarely, it is said, above half an hour at a 
time.* In 1849 a collection of his poems was 
published ; in 1857 came another, this time from 
his final publishers, Ticknor & Fields.f He had 

* My authority for this is a little monograph by Mrs. J. 
T. Fields. 

t The firm's name has changed several times. It is now 
Houghton, Mifflin & Company. 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEK 159 

now become a recognized literary figure. He 
was concerned in the starting of the Atlantic 
Monthly. The temper of the North was begin- 
ning at last to favour Abolition. In the civil 
war, dreadful as such an event was to his re- 
ligious convictions, he saw the hand of God de- 
stroying the great evil of slavery. He had always 
adhered to that branch of the Anti-slavery party 
which believed in opposing the national evil by 
regular political means. He was an ardent mem- 
ber of the Republican party. The close of the 
war, which found his principles victorious, found 
him in popular estimation a great man. 

In 1871 he was made a Fellow of the American 
Academy of Arts and Sciences.* It is not remem- 
bered that he ever attended a meeting. General 
society, even in its severer forms, he never found 
congenial. An occasional visit to intimate friends 
in Boston, and of a summer to the Isles of Shoals, 
or later to the hill country about Chocorua, were 
the chief incidents in his life. For all this super- 
ficial repose, however, he never stopped writing. 
His " Birthday Greeting," sent to Dr. Holmes on 
August 29, 1892, was written only a few weeks 
before his death. He died, in his eighty-fifth 
year, at Hampton Falls, New Hampshire, on Sep- 
tember 7, 1892. 

* By whose kindness I am permitted to reprint this me- 
moir from their Proceedings. 



160 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 



IV 

During his last years he made a final collection 
of his writings, with a few brief notes.* It is in 
seven volumes, four of verse and three of prose. 
The arrangement is a little confusing. He classi- 
fied his works under a number of not very definite 
heads ; and under each head printed his mate- 
rial chronologically. The first volume contains 
" Narrative and Legendary Poems," from 1830 to 
1888 ; the second contains " Poems of Nature/' 
from 1830 to 1886, " Poems Subjective and Rem- 
iniscent," from 1841 to 1887, and "Religious 
Poems," from 1830 to 1886 ; the third contains 
"Anti-slavery Poems," beginning with one to 
William Lloyd Garrison, in 1832, and ending with 
one to his memory, in 1879, and " Songs of Labor 
and Reform," from 1838 to 1887 ; the fourth con- 
tains " Personal Poems," from 1834 to 1886, " Oc- 
casional Poems," from 1852 to 1888, and reprints 
of the " Tent on the Beach," originally published 
in 1867, and of his last volume, "At Sundown," 
which originally appeared shortly after his death. 
In an Appendix are some youthful poems, written 
as early as 1825. The prose works are classified in 
a similarly confusing way. There is a volume of 
" Tales and Sketches," including his essay in his- 

* "The Writings of John Greenleaf Whittier." River- 
side Press : 1893. 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 161 

torical fiction, " Margaret Smith's Journal in the 
Province of Massachusetts Bay, 1678-9 ; " a vol- 
ume of "Old Portraits and Modern Sketches," 
" Personal Sketches and Tributes," and "His- 
torical Papers ; " and a volume concerning the 
" Conflict with Slavery," "Reform and Politics," 
" The Inner Life," and " Criticism." 

This bewildering arrangement of the work of 
sixty-seven years is characteristic. By far the 
longest article in any of the seven volumes is 
"Margaret Smith's Journal," which covers one 
hundred and eighty-six pages. By far the greater 
part of all the work consists of verses or papers 
which could easily have been written at a short 
sitting. Uncertain health, the early practice of 
journalism, and the lack of that higher education 
which demands prolonged intellectual effort in 
a single direction seem to have combined in pre- 
venting the power of sustained literary labor, 
As he writes of himself : * 

" His good was mainly an intent, 
His evil not of forethought done ; 
The work he wrought was rarely meant 
Or finished as begun. 

w 

" The words he spake, the thoughts he penned, 
Are mortal as his hand and brain, 
But if they serve the Master's end, 
He has not lived in vain. " 

* " My Namesake," Poetical Works, ii., 118, 121. 
11 



162 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

That last stanza is unduly modest. There are 
passages in Whitter's works which have strength 
and merit of a kind that ought to survive. Of 
his works as wholes, however, his criticism is 
true. There is hardly one in which the vital pas- 
sages are not half-buried in irrelevance, redund- 
ance, or common -place. The very confusion in 
which he finally presented his writings to pos- 
terity is typical of his inability to handle any- 
thing on a large scale. 



To one who, amid this confusion, sets himself 
to discover the characteristic traits of the work, 
the first salient features are not its merits. "Whit- 
tier was certainly precocious. Certainly, too, the 
power he displayed in youth did not meet the 
common fate of precocity. But the change from 
his earliest work to his latest is surprisingly 
slight. At seventeen he wrote, of the Merri- 
mac : * 

u Oh, lovely the scene, when the gray misty vapour 
Of morning is lifted from Merrimac's shore ; 
When the firefly, lighting his wild gleaming taper, 
The dimly seen lowlands comes glimmering o'er ; 

* Poetical Works, iv,, 336. In the rhythm the influence 
of Moore seems marked. 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEU 163 

When on thy calm surface the moonbeam falls brightly, 

And the dull bird of night is his covert forsaking, 
When the whippoorwill's notes from thy margin sound 
lightly, 
And break on the sound which thy small waves are 
making." 

At thirty-three he wrote of it again : * 

u But look ! the yellow light no more 
Streams down on wave and verdant shore ; 
And clearly on the calm air swells 
The twilight voice of distant bells. 
From Ocean's bosom, white and thin, 
The mists come slowly rolling in ; 
Hills, woods, the river's rocky rim 
Amidst the sea-like vapour swim, 
While yonder lonely coast-light, set 
Within its wave-washed minaret, 
Half -quenched, a beamless star and pale, 
Shines dimly through its cloudy veil ! " 

At fifty-nine he wrote of the light-house vis- 
ible from Hampton Beach : f 

4 ' Just then the ocean seemed 
To lift a half-faced moon in sight ; 
And shoreward o'er the waters gleamed, 
From crest to crest, a line of light. 

" Silently for a space each eye 
Upon that sudden glory turned : 
Cool from the land the breeze blew by, 
The tent-ropes flapped, the long beach churned 

* Poetical Works, ii., 12. 
t Ibid., iv., 281. 



164 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER 

Its waves to foam ; on either hand 
Stretched, far as sight, the hills of sand ; 

With bays of marsh, and capes of bush and tree, 
The woods black shore-line loomed beyond the 
meadowy sea." 

And as he dealt with Nature here, for above 
forty years simply looking and telling just what 
he saw, so he dealt with everything from be- 
ginning to end. For sixty-seven years his work 
retains its chief characteristics with remarkably 
slight alteration. 

The most salient of these characteristics, as I 
have said, are not the merits. The lines just 
cited have an obvious air of commonplace. It 
is deceptive. As one grows to know them, and 
the hundreds of others for which we must let them 
stand, one begins insensibly to realize that the 
power of selective observation which underlies 
them is of no common order. Commonplace, 
however, they surely look ; and commonplace be- 
yond all doubt are endless passages throughout 
Whittier's verse. The man lacked the saving grace 
of humour. In all the seven volumes I have found 
but one passage that really amused me : this is 
an account in ' ' Yankee Gypsies " * of how a 
drunken vagabond broke into the Whittier home- 
stead when the men were away, and made formal 
love to the dismayed grandmother, who was born 

* Prose Works, i., 339. 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 1G5 

Greenleaf. In Whittier's verse his lack of hu- 
mour is sometimes startling. In a poem * where 
a Yankee stage-driver describes the profoundly 
gracious merits of a passenger who once made 
him stop while she sketched a panoramic view, 
occurs this stanza : 

i4 4 As good as fair ; it seemed her joy 

To comfort and to give ; 
My poor, sick wife, and cripple boy, 

Will bless her while they live ! ' 
The tremor in the driver's tone 

His manhood did not shame : 
' I dare say, sir, you may have known ' 

He named a well-known name." 

And in a poem f commemorating a railway con- 
ductor who lost his life in an accident, come 
these passages : 

" Lo ! the ghastly lips of pain, 
Dead to all thought save duty's, moved again : 
4 Put out the signals for the other train ! ' 

" No nobler utterance since the world began 
From lips of saint or martyr ever ran, 
Electric, through the sympathies of man. 

44 Others he saved, himself he could not save. 

44 Nay, the lost life was saved. He is not dead 
Who in his record still the earth shall tread 
With God's clear aureole shining round his head." 

* 44 The Hill-Top ; " Poetical Works, iv., 58. 

t 44 Conductor Bradley ; " Poetical Works, i., 359. 



166 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

The noble simplicity of this second passage 
does something to atone for the appalling literal- 
ness and the monstrous hyperbole of the first. 
One cannot help wondering, though, whether any 
other writer of real merit than Whittier would 
ever have deliberately reprinted such passages 
side by side. 

His lack of humour, then, was serious. So, to 
a less degree, was his lack of artistic feeling. 
The remarkably narrow range of his metrical 
forms, the astonishing errors of his rhymes are 
familiar features of his verse. Another defect, 
too, must have been apparent to whoever has 
read even the passages already quoted. He had 
little strength of creative imagination. His 
poetical figures are almost always both obvious 
and trite. A light-house resembles a minaret ; 
the woods bordering a salt meadow are like the 
shore bordering the actual sea ; a good man, when 
dead, is provided with an aureole ; and so on. 
The moralizing passages frequent throughout his 
work display the same weakness. If in his lack 
of humour he sinks below the commonplace, there 
is nothing in the technical form of his work, or 
in the creative power of his imagination, which 
often rises above it. 

VI 

Yet as one grows to know the work of Whittier, 
one grows insensibly to feel that essentially it is 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 167 

far from commonplace, that it really deserves the 
importance accorded it in contemporary litera- 
ture, that no small part of it will probably out- 
live the age to which it was addressed, and per- 
haps even the work of any other contemporary 
American. I have purposely touched on his 
faults, and put them all together. Not to have 
recognized them would have been deliberately 
not to see him as he was. In growing to know 
his work, these are what one first remarks. By 
and by one finds them forgotten in a sense that 
this poet, whom one has grown to know, has 
in him lasting elements for which greatness 
is perhaps no undue name. Throughout the 
work of his sixty -seven years one feels with 
growing admiration a constant simplicity of feel- 
ing and of phrase, as pure as the country air he 
loved to breathe. One feels, too, constant, un- 
swerving purity of nature, of motive, of life. 
And if one feel, too, the limits of thought and 
of experience that made such purity and sim- 
plicity possible throughout eighty-five years of 
human existence, one is none the sadder for that. 
What Whittier voiced was a life that could be 
lived in our own New England through the 
stormiest years of the Nineteenth Century. Lim- 
ited though it were, that life throughout, in 
thought, in feeling, in word, in act, was simple 
and pure — commonplace, if you will, in more 
aspects than one, but in one never commonplace : 



168 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 

never for a moment was it ignoble. It has been 
the fortune of New England, above other parts of 
our country, to fix the standards and the ideals 
that have hitherto prevailed throughout the con- 
tinent of North America. There is courage in 
the thought that even in our own time New 
England could bring forth and sustain such noble 
purity as his. 

To feel how genuine, how pure, how noble the 
man was, with all his limits, we must consider his 
work in some detail. His own classification of 
it, as we have seen, is confusing. His prose work, 
once for all, is of little importance. It shows 
him possessed of a quietly pleasant narrative style, 
and of a controversial style which has considera- 
ble force. It phrases little or nothing, however, 
that is not equally phrased in his more favourite 
vehicle of verse. We may best consider, then, 
chiefly his verse : first, that part of it which most 
reveals himself ; then, that which deals with his 
own experience of Nature ; then, his romantic nar- 
ratives ; and finally, the work which he himself 
deemed most important — his life-long advocacy 
of human freedom. 

VII 

If masterpiece be not an extravagant term for 
any work of Whittiers, we may perhaps call 
" Snow-Bound " * his masterpiece. At fifty-seven, 
* Poetical Works, ii., 134-159. 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIEE 169 

when almost all of his immediate family were 
dead, he wrote in tenderly simple verse this rec- 
ord of his earliest memories. " Flemish pictures 
of old days," he calls it toward the end. The 
phrase would be apt, but that it ignores what 
seems to me the most notable trait of all. Flem- 
ish pictures one thinks of as pictures of a peas- 
antry. In " Snow-Bound " we have a country- 
folk very rare in human history. No life could 
be much simpler, much more remote from lux- 
urious comfort or lazy ease than the life that is 
pictured here; but for all their brave rusticity 
these sturdy Yankees, toiling in summer on their 
rocky farms, resting perforce in such winter 
moments as buried them in almost Arctic snow- 
drifts, are no peasants. What makes them what 
they are is that they are still lords of themselves 
and of the soil they till. Simple with all the 
simplicity of hereditary farming folk, they are at 
the same time gentle with the unconscious grace 
of people who are aware of no earthly superiors. 
This is the phase of human nature that Whittier 
knew first and best. This is what he assumed 
and believed that all mankind might be. "Very 
surely, too, this is the stuff of which any sound 
democracy must be made. So, of this stormy 
evening, he writes : 

" Shut in from all the world without, 
We sat the clean- winged hearth about, 



170 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 

Content to let the north-wind roar 
In baffled rage at pane and door, 
While the red logs before us beat 
The frost-line back with tropic heat ; 
And ever, when a louder blast 
Shook beam and rafter as it passed, 
The merrier up its roaring draught 
The great throat of the chimney laughed ; 
The house-dog on his paws outspread 
Laid to the lire his drowsy head, 
The cat's dark silhouette on the wall 
A couch ant tiger's seemed to fall ; 
And, for the winter fireside meet, 
Between the andirons' straggling feet, 
+ The mug of cider * simmered slow, 
The apples sputtered in a row, 
And, close at hand, the basket stood 
With nuts from brown October's wood." 

This vivid simplicity of description is generally 
recognized. Less obvious and less certainly 
known is the occasional ultimate simplicity of 
phrase which makes certain lines f in " Snow- 
Bound" notable. Take this reference to those 
that are no more : 

" We turn the pages that they read, 
Their written words we linger o'er, 
But in the sun they cast no shade, 
No voice is heard, no sign is made, 
No step is on the conscious floor ! " 

*It has generally been customary in New England, I 
am told, not to deem cider spirituous, 
t In the following passages the italics are mine. 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 171 

Again, take this couplet about the maiden aunt, 
so familiar a figure in New England households : 

" All unprofaned she held apart 
The virgin fancies of the heart." 

Again, these lines, for once imaginative : 

14 How many a poor one's blessing went 
With thee beneath the loiv green tent 
Whose curtain never outward swings." 



Again : 



" But still I wait with ear and eye 
For something gone that should be nigh, 
A loss in all familiar tilings, 
In flower that blooms, and bird that sings." 

Again still : 

" And while in life's late afternoon, 

Where cool and long the shadows grow, 

I walk to meet the night that soon 
Shall shape and shadow overflow, 

I cannot feel that thou art far." 

It was from such memories as these, thus re- 
membered, that he went to his work in this world. 
The very first poem in his class of " Subjective 
and Reminiscent " suggests, too, what rarely ap- 
pears in his writing, that he had tender memories, 
of a less domestic nature. For these verses, ad- 
dressed at the age of twenty-three to a lady of 



172 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTLES 

Calvinistic tendencies, from whom he seems to 
have been long parted, contain this passage : * 

" Ere this, thy quiet eye hath smiled 
My picture of thy youth to see, 

When, half a woman, half a child, 

Thy very artlessness beguiled, 
And folly'' s self seemed wise in thee." 

His chief work, as we have seen, he believed to 
be the work of reform. The personal effects of 
such work he felt sensibly. At thirty-five he 
wrote of himself for a lady's album : f 

" A banished name from Fashion's sphere, 
A lay unheard of Beauty's ear, 
Forbid, disowned, — what do they here? " 

At forty-five, in lines to his Namesake, J he draws 
his own portrait : 

" Some blamed him, some believed him good; 
The truth lay doubtless 'twixt the two ; 
He reconciled as best he could 
Old faith and fancies new. 



44 He loved his friends, forgave his foes ; 
And, if his words were harsh at times, 
He spared his fellow-men, — his blows 
Fell only on their crimes. 

* 4t Memories"; Poetical Works, ii., 96. 
+ 44 Ego" ; Poetical Works, ii., 102. 
J Poetical Works, ii., 116. 



JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER 173 

"He loved the great and wise, but found 
His human heart to all akin 
Who met him on the common ground 
Of suffering and sin. 



" 111 served his tides of feeling strong 
To turn the common mills of use ; 
And, over restless wings of song, 
His birthright garb hung loose ! 

11 His eye was beauty's powerless slave, 
And his the ear which discord pains ; 
Few guessed beneath his aspect grave 
What passions strove in chains. 

11 He worshipped as his fathers did, 

And kept the faith of childish days, 
And, howsoever he strayed or slid, 
He loved the good old ways — 

"The simple tastes, the kindly traits, 
The tranquil air, and gentle speech, 
The silence of the soul that waits 
For more than man to teach. 



" And listening with his forehead bowed, 
Heard the Divine compassion fill 
The pauses of the trump and cloud 
With whispers small and still." 

However his actual belief may have been affected 
by the immense growth of devout free thought 



174 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

about him, he never for a moment faltered in 
faith that the inner light of the Friends is real. 
On his sixty-fourth birthday, he wrote : * 

" God is, and all is well ! 

" His light shines on me from above, 
His low voice speaks within, — 
The patience of immortal love 
Outwearying mortal sin." 

And again, at seventy-eight : f 

" By all that He requires of me, 
I know what God himself must be. 

" No picture to my aid I call, 

I shape no image in my prayer ; 
I only know in Him is all 

Of life, light, beauty, everywhere." 

In his last volume are some lines J which must 
have been written about this time, concerning an 
outdoor reception, where some young girls had 
pleased him : 

" But though I feel, with Solomon, 
'Tis pleasant to behold the sun, 
I would not if I could repeat 
A life which still is good and sweet ; 

* u My Birthday " ; Poetical Works, ii., 164. 

t "Revelation " ; Poetical Works, ii., 343. 

% u An Outdoor Reception " ; Poetical Works, iv., 297. 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 175 

I keep in age, as in my prime, 
A not uncheerf ul step with time. 



11 On easy terms with law and fate, 
For what must be I calmly wait, 
And trust the path I cannot see,- 
That God is good sufficeth me." 



VIII 

With less quotation we could hardly have ap- 
preciated the effect of Whit tier's personality that 
emerges from these self- expressive poems. Super- 
ficially commonplace in their simplicity, they 
really express a character in which the simple vir- 
tues of New England are so firmly rooted that by 
very force of its unassuming strength it becomes 
strongly individual. It is pervaded, however, 
with true Yankee melancholy, for which, so far 
as we have yet seen, there was no help but what 
might be found in fervent religion and its accom- 
panying duties. Throughout life, however, Whit- 
tier had another resource. To quote once more 
from the poem to his namesake, from which I 
have already quoted much : 

" Yet Heaven was kind, and here a bird 
And there a flower beguiled his way ; 
And, cool, in summer noons, he heard 
The fountains plash and play. 



176 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIER 

"On all his sad or restless moods 

The patient peace of Nature stole ; 
The quiet of the fields and woods 
Sank deep into his soul." 

In other words, Whittier found in the contem- 
plation of New England landscape the most con- 
stant, lasting pleasure of his life. 

In his collected works, the poems he classifies 
as u of Nature " fill only eighty-six pages. In re- 
ality, poetry of Nature pervades his whole work. 
Under this head, for example, may clearly fall 
the first lines to the Merrimac which I quoted, * 
and the passage concerning night-fall on Hamp- 
ton Beach,f as well as a great part of "Snow- 
Bound." Yet all these are classified elsewhere. 
So are numberless passages like the following, 
which to his mind is apparently either narrative 
or legendary : $ 

41 Along the roadside, like the flowers of gold 
The tawny Incas for their gardens wrought, 
Heavy with sunshine droops the golden-rod, 
And the red pennons of the cardinal-flowers 
Hang motionless upon their upright staves. 
The sky is hot and hazy, and the wind, 
Wing-weary with its long flight from the south, 
Unfelt ; yet, closely scanned, yon maple leaf 
With faintest motion, as one stirs in dreams, 

* Page 162. t Page 163. 

% " Among the Hills ; " Poetical Works, i., 260. It is 
fair to add that this extract is from the Prelude. 



JOHN GKEENLEAE WHITTIEE 177 

Confesses it. The locust by the wall 
Stabs the noon-silence with his sharp alarm. 
A single hay -cart down the dusty road 
Creaks slowly, with its driver fast asleep 
On the load's top. Against the -neighboring hill, 
Huddled along the stone-wall 1 s shady side, 
The sheep show white, as if a snow-drift still 
Defied the dog-star. Through the open door 
A drowsy smell of flowers — gray heliotrope, 
And white sweet clover, and shy mignonette — 
Comes faintly in, and silent chorus lends 
To the prevailing symphony of peace." 

Everywhere in Whittier's work one may find 
such pictures. Quite to appreciate them, per- 
haps, one must know the country they deal with. 
The regions of New England that Whittier knew 
have a character peculiarly their own. The rocky 
coast between Cape Ann and the Piscataqua, 
broken by long stretches of beach ; the marshes, 
dotted with great stacks of salt hay, stretching 
back to the woods or the farms of the solid land ; 
the rolling country, with its elms and pines, its 
gnarled apple-orchards, its gray wooden farm- 
houses ; and almost within sight the lower spurs 
of the New Hampshire hills, bristling with a 
stubble of young woods, are unlike any other 
country I know. Such subtile impressions as 
mark the individuality of a region are unmis- 
takable, but almost beyond the power of words to 
phrase. Perhaps the trait which most distin- 
guishes this country that Whittier so knew and 
12 



178 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 

loved, is a nearer approach to the suggestion of a 
romantic past than is common in North America. 
Far as the eye can reach or the foot travel, this 
region has been the home of our own race for 
above two centuries. It has its own traditions, 
its own legends. It is humanized in a way al- 
most European. Yet its legends and its tra- 
ditions belong to a past not of civilized or me- 
diaeval grandeur, but of savage wildness. And 
its actual prosperity is past or passing — but for 
great factories, swarming with foreign operatives, 
or for summer visitors who come to idle in the 
regions where the toil of the past generations 
bred the race that has tamed a savage continent. 

In these regions it was Whittier's lot to know 
the last days of the olden time and the first of 
the new. He loved the old days for their hardy 
virtues ; his faith in human nature, always guided 
by the inner light, allowed him no misgivings for 
the future. In " Cobbler Keezar's Vision," * the 
German wizard finds the Merrimac of the future, 
with its scores of mill-wheels, and its white-walled 
farm-houses, and its floating flags of freedom, 
a lovelier sight than his memories of the vine- 
clad Rhine, with its clowns and puppets, its flag- 
ons and its despotism. Whittier found the Mer- 
rimac lovelier himself — a task in which he was 
probably helped by the narrow limits of his 

* Poetical Works, i M 241. 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 179 

travels. He loved the Nature about him. He 
found in it something which constantly reward- 
ed and strengthened his life-long love. 

Expressing this constant delight in the country 
that his verses have made peculiarly his own, he 
accomplished, half unwittingly, the work which in 
all likelihood will ultimately be thought his best. 
One may question, if one choose, the merit of his 
personal and religious poems ; one may find his 
romantic narratives trivial, and his passionate 
advocacy of reform blind, dangerous, truculent ; 
but one cannot deny that he has seen the land- 
scapes of his own New England with an eye as 
searching as it was loving, or that he has told 
us what he saw so simply, so truly, so constantly 
that, however time or chance may change in 
years to come the face of the regions he knew so 
well, the things he saw and loved may be seen 
and loved throughout time by all who will but 
read. The peculiar character of his poetry of 
Nature is that it is not interpretative but faith- 
fully representative. The examples of it already 
quoted are enough to show this trait. There are 
critics, then, and real lovers of poetry, who find 
his work harshly literal, unimaginative, prosaic. 
Such critics, I think, will not let themselves sym- 
pathize with the exquisitely sympathetic sense of 
fact which underlies his utter simplicity. When 
he tried to interpret, he added nothing to his 
work. When he was content to tell us what he 



180 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

saw, lie showed us constantly what many of lis 
should never have seen for ourselves ; and this he 
showed so truly that, as in the course of centuries 
proves true of the art which the centuries pro- 
nounce great, each one of us may in turn inter- 
pret it anew for himself, just as each may in- 
terpret for himself the life that passes before his 
living eyes. 



IX 



In this constant strength of his instinctive 
fidelity to Nature, Whittier distinguishes him- 
self from almost all other American men of let- 
ters. In most of our literature there is a quality 
of consciousness. Sometimes this takes the form 
of aggressive cleverness ; sometimes it deliber- 
ately assumes the traditional dignity of culture ; 
often — and perhaps most characteristically — it 
half-consciously, half-unwittingly follows or re- 
vives tradition. As somebody has extravagantly 
said, American verse swarms with nightingales — 
a bird unknown on this continent. For this state 
of things there is a reason which these perhaps 
imaginary nightingales typify. An American 
would not be a true son of the fathers if he did 
not instinctively love tradition. The emigrants 
brought from the Old World fireside tales of 
things and folks, of pomps and grandeurs, of 
comedies and tragedies which their children could 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 181 

never know in the flesh. And history has moved 
fast with us, and society has been overturned 
more than once. And Western children to-day 
are listening to such stories of New England as 
Yankee children of the early days heard about 
Old England itself. This love of tradition, which 
shows itself perhaps most markedly in the pas- 
sion for genealogy which permeates New Eng- 
land, is a prime trait of the true Yankee. Whit- 
tier was as true a Yankee as ever lived. His first 
published volume, we remember, was a volume 
of " New England Legends." New England le- 
gends he continued to write almost all his life ; 
and, as his reading extended, he wrote many 
other legends, too, of regions and races that he 
had never known in the flesh. 

Of the latter little need be said. They are 
not profoundly characteristic. He got them 
from books, and he put them into other books, 
where their simple ballad-form makes them pleas- 
antly readable. He generally managed to infuse 
into them a certain amount of blameless moraliz- 
ing which does not enhance their stimulating 
quality. On the whole, we may class them with 
that great body of innocuous American verse 
which is permeated with the innocent unreality 
of conscious culture. 

The New England legends are of firmer stuff. 
In his prose works one finds some of the material 
that goes to make them. "Charms and Fairy 



182 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 

Faith," and "Magicians and Witch Folk "* tell 
of such actual traditions as were kept alive at the 
snow-bound fireside. "Margaret Smith's Jour- 
nal,"! while no permanent contribution to his- 
torical fiction, is so true a picture of the Seven- 
teenth Century in New England as to prove 
beyond perad venture the solidity of Whittier's 
study in local history. And verses like these J 
show how well he knew the ancestral Puritans : 

" With the memory of that morning by the summer sea I 

blend 
A wild and wondrous story, by the younger Mather 

penned, 
In that quaint Magnolia Christi, with all strange and 

marvellous things, 
Heaped up huge and undigested, like the chaos Ovid 

sings. 

" Dear to me these far, faint glimpses of the dual life of 

old, 
Inward, grand with awe and reverence ; outward, mean 

and coarse and cold ; 
Gleams of mystic beauty playing over dull and vulgar 

clay, 
Golden-threaded fancies weaving in a web of hodden 

gray. " 

His romantic and legendary narratives of New 
England, then, have much of the true flavour of 

* Prose Works, i., 385, 399. t Ibid., 9. 

X " The Garrison of Cape Ann ; " Poetical Works, i., 166. 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 183 

the soil. He seems to have been haunted, how- 
ever, by a lurking Yankee conscience which con- 
stantly suggested doubts as to whether it is quite 
right to tell a good story just for its own sake. 
His introduction to the "Tent on the Beach,"* 
the volume which contained, on the whole, his 
most effective narrative poems, is distinctly apol- 
ogetic. Here, at fifty-nine, he writes : 

14 I would not sin in this half -playful strain, — 

Too light perhaps for serious years, though born 

Of the enforced leisure of slow pain, — 
Against the pure ideal which has drawn 

My feet to follow its far-shining gleam. " 

As a result of this state of things, his narratives 
of New England tradition generally deal with 
such phases of it as have perceptible didactic sig- 
nificance. Naturally, he represents the Quakers 
heroically. A typical stanza is this, from the 
4 ' King's Missive," written at seventy-two : f 

4 4 ' Off with the knave's hat ! ' An angry hand 
Smote down the offence ; but the wearer said, 
With a quiet smile, ' By the king's command 
I bear his message and stand in his stead. ' 
In the Governor's hand a missive he laid 
With the royal arms on its seal displayed, 

* Poetical Works, iv., 227. 

t Ibid., i., 383. We must remember that Quaker prin- 
ciples forbade salutation by uncovering the head. 



184 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 

And the proud man spake as he glanced thereat, 
Uncovering, l Give Mr. Shattuck his hat.' " 

Indubitably didactic in motive, too, are those 
two narrative poems of his which are apparently 
most familiar : " Maud Muller," * written at forty- 
six ; and ' ' Skipper Ireson's Ride," f written at 
forty-nine. The merits and the limits of his 
work in this kind are patent in " Maud Muller." 
The little poem is very simple, and in its conven- 
tional sentimentality is very acceptable to the 
great American public. In its presentation of a 
Yankee judge in the character of a knightly hero 
of romance, it is artlessly consonant with the so- 
cial ideals of the Yankee country ; so, too, in its 
tacit assumption that the good looks of a bare- 
foot country beauty would really have been more 
congenial life-companions in an eminent legal 
career than the rich dower and the fashionable 
tendencies of the lady whom the Judge ultimately 
married in deference to 

u his sisters proud and cold, 
And his mother, vain of her rank and gold. " 

If this sort of thing were canting, it would be 
abominable. What saves it is that it rings true. 
The man meant it seriously. We may smile at 
his simplicity, if we like; but we can hardly 
help loving him for it. Indeed, it is almost 

* Poetical Works, i. , 148. t Ibid. , 1 74. 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 185 

enough to make us forgive that insidiously dread- 
ful rhyme — 

" For of all sad words of tongue or pen, 
The saddest are these : 4 It might have been ! ' " 

11 Skipper Ireson's Ride," on the other hand, 
has much of the true ballad quality : 

" Body of turkey, head of owl, 
Wings a-droop like a rained-on fowl, 
Feathered and ruffled in every part, 
Skipper Ireson stood in the cart. 
Scores of women, old and young, 
Strong of muscle and glib of tongue, 
Pushed and pulled up the rocky lane, 
Shouting and singing the shrill refrain : 
4 Here's Flud Oirson, fur his horrd horrt, 
Torr'd an' futherr'd an' corr'd in a corrt 
By the women o' Morble'ead ! ' " 

Such a subject as this stirred the Yankee 
Quaker to the depths. A human being, deaf to 
the still small voice, had acted devilishly. The 
weakest creatures of his seaside home had ris- 
en up against him ; and, not overstepping the 
bounds of due punishment, had held him up last- 
ingly to public scorn and detestation. It is per- 
haps instructive, in connection with such reform- 
ing enthusiasm as pervades this spirited ballad, 
to learn from a note in the final edition * that, 
twenty-two years after the original publication, 

* Poetical Works, i., 174. 



186 JOHN GBEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

Whittier was credibly informed that Ireson had 
really been innocent. Against the skipper's will, 
it appeared, his refractory crew had compelled 
him to desert his sinking townsfolk ; and then, to 
screen themselves, they had falsely accused him, 
with the direful result commemorated by the poet. 
His answer to his informant is characteristic : 

" I have now no doubt that thy version of Skipper Ire- 
son's ride is the correct one. My verse was founded solely 
on a fragment of rhyme which I heard from one of my 
early schoolmates, a native of Marblehead. 

"I supposed the story to which it referred dated back at 
least a century. I knew nothing of the participators, and 
the narrative of the ballad was pure fancy, I am glad 
for the sake of truth and justice that the real facts are 
given in thy book. I certainly would not knowingly do 
injustice to any one, dead or living." 

And having thus, introductorily, done full justice 
to the memory of poor Floyd Ireson, he proceeds 
to reprint his ballad. 

In touching these narrative and legendary poems 
of Whittier, I have perhaps allowed myself to lay 
undue emphasis on phases of them that are not 
their best. One and all of them we may cer- 
tainly call simple, earnest, artless, and beautifully 
true to the native traditions and temper of New 
England. In that last fact, however, which I have 
tried to emphasize, lies their weakness as litera- 
ture. The temper of New England is essentially 
serious, always uncomfortable if it cannot defend 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 187 

itself on firm ethical grounds. Thoroughly good 
narrative, on the other hand, ought to be as free 
from obvious ethical admixture as are the ex- 
quisitely pure descriptions of New England land- 
scape, which seem to me Whittier's most lasting 
work. At times these narratives of his blend 
almost inextricably with his poems of Nature ; 
from the narratives may be selected extracts 
which, in simple descriptive power, are as beau- 
tiful as anything Whittier ever did. In general, 
however, the impression that these narratives 
make is one of saturation with the traditional eth- 
ical ideals of New England, curiously combined 
with that constant reliance on inner inspiration 
toward the Right which is the fundamental tenet 
of the Quaker faith. All men are really equal, he 
assumes throughout, all ought to be really free ; 
let them be free, and all they have to do is to fol- 
low the inner light. And here these narrative 
poems touch close, on the other hand, the works 
which Whittier deemed his best — his works for 
reform. A passage like this, which closes the 
<c King's Missive,"* might have belonged to 
either class : 

u The Puritan spirit perishing not, 

To Concord's yeomen the signal sent, 
And spake in the voice of the cannon-shot 
That severed the chains of a continent. 

* Poetical Works, i., 386. 



188 JOHN GEEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

With its gentler message of peace and good-will 
The thought of the Quaker is living still, 
And the freedom of soul he prophesied 
Is gospel and law where the martyrs died." 



From beginning to end, Whittier was an hon- 
est champion of human freedom. We have seen 
enough of the peculiar religious faith from which 
he never swerved, to understand how inevitable 
such a position must have seemed to him. We 
have seen enough of his own almost childlike 
simplicity and honesty of temperament to under- 
stand the whole-souled, unhesitating vigour with 
which he threw himself into the task to which he 
felt himself called. To every human being, he be- 
lieved, God has given the inner light. Leave hu- 
man beings free to act, then, as God meant them 
to act, and God's will shall be done. The voice of 
the people is literally the voice of God ; it is the 
concrete, numerical expression of the whisperings 
of the still small voice. Whether the human form 
to which the voice whispers be European, Asiatic, 
African, or American, makes no manner of differ- 
ence. Difference of race is merely a variety of 
complexion ; a majority of negroes is as divinely 
true a force as a majority of Puritan farmers. 
Are not all alike made in God's image, all alike 
human, all alike accessible to the inner light and 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 189 

the still small voice which can lead only toward 
the Truth ? Admit such premises — and Whit tier 
never for a moment doubted them — and there is 
room for only one conclusion : Whatever opposes 
any form of human freedom is against God's will. 
Not to proclaim this truth — not to assert it in 
every word and deed — is to be what Whittier 
could never have been, a deliberate coward. 

In the course of his life he advocated more re- 
forms than one. His conduct in regard to the 
abolition of slavery, however, is typical of his 
conduct throughout. It will serve our purpose to 
consider that alone. 

Quite to appreciate the courage implied in the 
public assertion of anti- slavery opinions sixty 
years ago demands to-day no small effort of im- 
agination. It was far greater than that which 
would be shown to-day by an ambitious aspirant 
for public honours who should honestly and openly 
question the wisdom of the ultimate abolition of 
slavery. To-day such an opinion, which was the 
dominant opinion in 1830, could result in no 
worse harm than political ridicule or neglect. 
It would hardly diminish the number or the cor- 
diality of one's social invitations. In 1830 an 
Abolitionist was held little less than treasonable. 
Social ostracism was almost certainly his due. 
His very person was not safe from public attack ; 
and the blind hostility of the mob — which for 
some years to come was far too noisy to detect the 



190 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 

whisperings of any still small voice — was con- 
firmed by that profoundly honest belief in the 
public duty of maintaining existing institutions 
which has always characterized the better classes 
in any community of British origin. Perhaps the 
closest analogy which we can imagine to-day to 
the Abolitionists of 1833 would be a body of 
earnest, God-fearing men who should be con- 
vinced that God bade them cry out against the 
institution of marriage. 

In the face of such a state of public opinion as 
this, Whittier never for a moment faltered. He 
knew he was right. The one curse spared him 
was the curse of even momentary doubt. Shy in 
temperament, loving most of all the simple seclu- 
sion of his native country, he never hesitated to 
speak and to act with all his power for the cause 
of human freedom. That enfranchisement, in the 
broadest sense, could possibly result only in a 
new phase of evil, he never dreamt to the end. 
He was a man. Negroes, Indians, Chinamen, 
Polish Jews, are men, too. Let all have equal 
rights, all an equal voice, all be equal in the sight 
of man as they are eternally equal in the sight of 
God. 

What he actually did we have seen in our 
brief record of his life. That brief record has been 
enough to show that the dreadful fact of slavery 
was a fact of which he had little direct knowl- 
edge. He was at Washington in 1845. Apart 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 191 

from that his knowledge of actual slaves must 
have been derived chiefly from fugitives, whose 
versions of their experience must wholly have 
confirmed his most extreme views. But what 
mattered that? When one knows a thing evil, 
one need not study it in detail to know that right 
and justice demand its extinction. From such 
fanatical, heroic logic there is no escape. We 
have seen, I said, what his actual conduct was. 
For thirty years and more his words supported, 
defended, urged on such lines of conduct. Oc- 
casionally, in his own phrase,* 

"The cant of party, school, and sect, 
Provoked at times his honest scorn, 
And Folly, in its gray respect, 
He tossed on satire's horn." 

As we have seen, though, he lacked humour or 
wit to make his satire really powerful or tren- 
chant. His words that really did their work, the 
words that still tell the story of the great public 
movement in which he was a foremost figure, 
were those simple, passionate utterances that came 
straight from his heart. 

There is room here to quote only a few. But 
a very few should suffice to give some taste of the 
quality of all. 

At twenty-six he wrote, for the meeting of 

* Poetical Works, ii., 120. 



192 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

the Anti-Slavery Society in New York, a hymn.* 
Here are a few stanzas : 

14 When from each temple of the free, 
A nation's voice ascends to Heaven, 
Most Holy Father ! unto Thee 

May not our humble prayer be given ? 

44 Thy children all, though hue and form 
Are varied in Thine own good will, 
With Thy own holy breathings warm, 
And fashioned in Thine image still. 

44 For broken heart, and clouded mind, 
Whereon no human mercies fall ; 
Oh, be Thy gracious love inclined, 
Who, as a Father, pitiest all ! 

41 And grant, O Father ! that the time 
Of Earth's deliverance may be near, 
When every land and tongue and clime 
The message of Thy love shall hear." 

At twenty-eight, when resolutions had been 
adopted in Congress forbidding the postal cir- 
culation of anti-slavery literature, he wrote a 
44 Summons "f to the North. Here is a touch of 
its quality : 

44 Methinks from all her wild, green mountains ; 
From valleys where her slumbering fathers lie ; 
From her blue rivers and her welling fountains, 
And clear, cold sky ; 

* Poetical Works, iii., 29. t Ibid., 40. 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEB 193 

" From her rough coast and isles, which hungry Ocean 
Gnaws with his surges ; from the fisher's skiff, 
With white sail swaying to the billows' motion 
Round rock and cliff ; 

u From the free fireside of her unbought farmer ; 
From her free laborer at his loom and wheel ; 
From the brown smith- shop, where, beneath the hammer, 
Rings the red steel ; 

u From each and all, if God hath not forsaken 
Our land, and left us to an evil choice, 
Loud as the summer thunderbolt shall waken 
A People's voice. 

" Startling and stern ! the Northern winds shall bear it 
Over Potomac's to St. Mary's wave ; 
And buried Freedom shall awake to hear it 
Within her grave." 

At thirty-five he wrote the passionate address, 
" Massachusetts to Virginia,"* concerning the 
seizure in Boston of one Latimer, a fugitive 
slave. To appreciate its stirring vigour one 
should read it all. But here is a bit of it : 

" From Norfolk's ancient villages, from Plymouth's rocky 
bound 
To where Nantucket feels the arms of ocean close her 
round ; 

" From rich and rural Worcester, where through the calm 
repose 
Of cultured vales and fringing woods the gentle Nashua 
flows, 

* Poetical Works, iii., 80. 
13 



194 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIEE 

To where Wachuset's wintry blasts the mountain larches 

stir, 
Swelled up to Heaven the thrilling cry of ' God save 

Latimer ! ' 

"And sandy Barnstable rose up, wet with the salt sea 

spray ; 
And Bristol sent her answering shout down Narragansett 

Bay! 
Along the broad Connecticut old Hampden felt the thrill, 
And the cheer of Hampshire's woodmen swept down from 

Holyoke Hill. 

u The voice of Massachusetts ! Of her free sons and daugh- 
ters, 

Deep calling unto deep aloud, the sound of many waters ! 

Against the burden of that voice what tyrant power shall 
stand ? 

No fetters in the Bay State ! No slave upon her land ! " 

At forty-nine, when the elections of 1856 had 
shown the gains of the Free -Soil party, he wrote 
this : * 

" For God be praised ! New England 

Takes once more her ancient place ; 
Again the Pilgrim's banner 
Leads the vanguard of the race. 



" The Northern hills are blazing, 
The Northern skies are bright ; 
The fair young West is turning 
Her forehead to the light ! 

* " A Song; " Poetical Works, iii., 192. 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIEK 195 

1 ' Push every outpost nearer, 

Press hard the hostile towers ! 
Another Balaklava, 
And the Malakoff is ours ! " 

The tide was turning. Four years later came 
the war. Here is a bit of his first war poem : * 

" We see not, know not ; all our way- 
Is night — with Thee alone is day : 
From out the torrent's troubled drift, 
Above the storm our prayers we lift, 
Thy will be done ! 



" Strike, Thou the Master, we Thy keys, 
The anthem of the destinies ! 
The minor of Thy loftier strain, 
Our hearts shall breathe the old refrain, 
Thy will be done ! " 

"Barbara Frietchie"f every one knows— per- 
haps the most instantly popular ballad of the 
war. " Laus Deo ! " J in celebration of the con- 
stitutional abolition of slavery, is not so familiar. 
Every word of that should be read, too. Here 

are a few : 

"It is done ! 
Clang of bell and roar of gun 
Send the tidings up and down. 
How the belfries rock and reel ! 
How the great guns, peal on peal, 
Fling the joy from town to town ! 



* "Thy Will be Done ; " Poetical Works, hi., 217. 
t Poetical Works, iii., 245. % Ibid., 254. 



196 JOHN GBEENLEAE WHITTIER 

"Did we dare, 

In our agony of prayer, 
Ask for more than He has done ? 

When was ever His right hand 

Over any time or land 
Strefcched as now beneath the sun ? 



" Ring and swing, 
Bells of joy ! On morning's wing 

Send the song of praise abroad ! 
With a sound of broken chains 
Tell the nations that He reigns, 

Who alone is Lord and God ! " 

These few extracts must suffice to represent 
the most earnest work he did for above thirty 
years. With more intensity, with genuine pas- 
sion, they show the same sincerity, the same sim- 
plicity that we have felt in him throughout. 
And he knew the rare happiness of complete con- 
quest. Beginning with all the world against him, 
he found himself for the last twenty years of his 
life in a world where all were against his foes. 

XI 

In view of this, we may well pause to consider 
two extracts from his writings — one in prose and 
one in verse — without which our impression of 
him would be seriously incomplete. They show 
that he possessed the power which is perhaps the 
test of manly greatness — the power of serenely 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 197 

recognizing the worth of men from whom for 
years he honestly and passionately differed. 

The first is from a letter of regret that he could 
not attend a meeting in memory of Edward Ev- 
erett : * 

" When the grave closed over him who added new lustre 
to the old and honoured name of Quincy, all eyes instinc- 
tively turned to Edward Everett as the last of that vener- 
ated class of patriotic civilians who, outliving all dissent 
and jealousy and party prejudice, held their reputation by 
the secure tenure of the universal appreciation of its 
worth as a common treasure of the republic. It is not for 
me to pronounce his eulogy. . . . My secluded country 
life has afforded me few opportunities of personal inter- 
course with him, while my pronounced radicalism on the 
great question which has divided popular feeling rendered 
our political paths widely divergent. Both of us early 
saw the danger which threatened the country. . . . 
But while he believed in the possibility of averting it 
by concession and compromise, I, on the contrary, as 
firmly believed that such a course could only strengthen 
and confirm what I regarded as a gigantic conspiracy 
against the rights and liberties, the union and the life, 
of the nation. . . . 

*' Recent events have certainly not tended to change 
this belief on my part; but in looking over the past, 
while I see little or nothing to retract in the matter of 
opinion, I am saddened by the reflection that through the 
very intensity of my convictions I may have done injus- 
tice to the motives of those with whom I differed. As 
respects Edward Everett, it seems to me that only within 
the last four years 1 1 have truly known him." 

* Prose Works, ii. , 274. Written in 1865. 

t These, we must remember, were the years of the war. 



198 JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTIER 

Fifteen years before lie wrote this letter, be 
had written concerning "Webster's Seventh-of- 
March Speech the scathing invective which he 
named " Ichabod : " * 

' ' So fallen ! so lost ! the light withdrawn 
Which once he wore ! 
The glory from his grey hairs gone 
For evermore ! 



k ' Let not the land once proud of him 
Insult him now, 
Nor brand with deeper shame the dim, 
Dishonoured brow. 

u But let its humbled sons, instead, 
From sea to lake, 
A long lament, as for the dead, 
In sadness make. 

Cl Then pay the reverence of old days 
To his dead fame ; 
Walk backward, with averted gaze, 
And hide the shame ! " 

Fifteen years after Edward Everett's death, and 
thirty years after this "Ichabod" had seen the 
light, Whittier wrote of Webster once more. In 
his collected works he departs for once from 
chronology, and puts beside " Ichabod " his final 
poem on Webster — the " Lost Occasion : " f 

* Poetical Works, iv., 62. t Ibid., 63. 



JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 199 

" Thou shouldst have lived to feel below 
Thy feet Disunion's fierce upthrow ; 
The late- sprung mine that underlaid 
Thy sad concessions vainly made. 
Thou shouldst have seen from Sumter's wall 
The star-flag of the Union fall, 
And armed rebellion pressing on 
The broken lines of Washington ! 
No stronger voice than thine had then 
Called out the utmost might of men, 
To make the Union's charter free 
And strengthen law by liberty. 



Wise men and strong we did not lack ; 
But still, with memory turning back, 
In the dark hours we thought of thee, 
And thy lone grave beside the sea. 

But, where thy native mountains bare 

Their foreheads to diviner air, 

Fit emblem of enduring fame, 

One lofty summit keeps thy name. 

For thee the cosmic forces did 

The rearing of that pyramid, 

The prescient ages shaping with 

Fire, flood, and frost thy monolith, 

Sunrise and sunset lay thereon 

With hands of light their benison, 

The stars of midnight pause to set 

Their jewels in its coronet. 

And evermore that mountain mass 

Seems climbing from the shadowy pass 

To light, as if to manifest 

Thy nobler self, thy life at best ! " 



200 JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER 

Is it too much to see in these lines not an as- 
sent but an approach to that view of the Seven th- 
of -March Speech which some, of the younger 
generation, are beginning to take? that it may 
have been not what men thought it at the time — 
a blind sacrifice of principle to self ; but rather 
the most nobly patriotic act of a nobly patriotic 
career — a deliberate sacrifice of self to the Union 
which without such sacrifice was not yet strong 
enough to survive ? 

XII 

But this is not the place for political specula- 
tion. I have tried to show Whitfcier as he was, 
extenuating nothing nor setting down aught in 
malice. Above most men, he was one who can 
stand the test. His faults are patent. One can- 
not read him long without forgetting them in 
admiration of his nobly simple merits. Before 
considering his work in detail, I suggested that 
his chance of survival is better than that of any 
other contemporary American man of letters. 
Our consideration of his work has perhaps shown 
why. In the first place, he has recorded in a way 
as yet unapproached the homely beauties of New 
England Nature. In the second, he accepted with 
all his heart the traditional democratic principles 
of equality and freedom which have always ani- 
mated the people of New England. These prin- 



JOHN GKEENLEAF WHITTLES 201 

ciples he uttered in words whose simplicity goes 
straight to the hearts of the whole American peo- 
ple. Whether these principles be true or false is 
no concern of ours here. If our republic is to live, 
they are the principles which must prevail. And 
in the verses of Whittier they are preserved to 
guide posterity, in the words of one who was in- 
capable of falsehood. 



VII 
MR. LOWELL AS A TEACHER 



[Published in Scribfier's Magazine, November, 1891.] 



ME. LOWELL AS A TEACHER 



As a student in Harvard College during the 
years 1876 and 1877— the last two years of Mr. 
Lowell's regular teaching there — I had the fort- 
une to be his pupil. My memories of him, in a 
character not generally known, are perhaps worth 
recording. 

II 

In my Junior year, a lecture of Professor Nor- 
ton's excited in me a wish to read Dante under 
Mr. Lowell. I did not know a word of Italian, 
though; and I was firmly resolved to waste no 
more time on elementary grammar. Without 
much hope of a favourable reception, then, I ap- 
plied for admission to the course. Mr. Lowell re- 
ceived me in one of the small recitation -rooms in 
the upper story of University Hall. My first im- 
pression was that he was surprisingly hirsute, and 
a little eccentric in aspect. He wore a double- 
breasted sack-coat, by no means new. In his neck- 
tie, which was tied in a sailor-knot, was a pin— an 
article of adornment at that time recently con- 



206 LOWELL 

denmed by an authority which some of us were 
then disposed to accept as gospel. On his desk 
lay a silk hat not lately brushed ; and nobody, I 
then held, had any business to wear a silk hat un- 
less he wore coat-tails, too. 

My second impression, which was fixed the 
moment he looked at me, and which has never 
altered, was that I had never met anybody quite 
so quizzical. Naturally I was not exactly at ease ; 
and Mr. Lowell appeared to take a repressed but 
boyish delight in keeping me a bit uneasy. He 
listened to my application kindly, though ; and 
finally, with a gesture that I remember as very 
like a stretch, told me to come in to the course 
and see what I could do with Dante. 

To that time my experience of academic teach- 
ing had led me to the belief that the only way to 
study a classic text in any language was to scru- 
tinize every syllable with a care undisturbed by 
consideration of any more of the context than was 
grammatically related to it. Any real reading I 
had done, I had had to do without a teacher. Mr. 
Lowell never gave us less than a canto to read ; 
and often gave us two or three. He never, from 
the beginning, bothered us with a particle of lin- 
guistic irrelevance. Here before us was a great 
poem — a lasting expression of what human life 
had meant to a human being, dead and gone 
these five centuries. Let us try, as best we 
might, to see what life had meant to this man ; 



LOWELL 207 

let us see what relation his experience, great and 
small, bore to ours ; and, now and then, let us 
pause for a moment to notice how wonderfully 
beautiful his expression of this experience was. 
Let us read, as sympathetically as we could make 
ourselves read, the words of one who was as much 
a man as we ; only vastly greater in his knowledge 
of wisdom and of beauty. That was the spirit of 
Ml*. Lowell's teaching. It opened to some of us 
a new world. In a month, I could read Dante 
better than I ever learned to read Greek, or Latin, 
or German. 

His method of teaching was all his own. The 
class was small— not above ten or a dozen; and 
he generally began by making each student trans- 
late a few lines, interrupting now and then with 
suggestions of the poetic value of passages which 
were being rendered in a style too exasperatingly 
prosaic. Now and again, some word or some pas- 
sage would suggest to him a line of thought — 
sometimes very earnest, sometimes paradoxically 
comical — that it would never have suggested to 
anyone else. And he would lean back in his 
chair, and talk away across country till he felt 
like stopping ; or he would thrust his hands into 
the pockets of his rather shabby sack-coat, and 
pace the end of the room with his heavy laced 
boots, and look at nothing in particular, and dis- 
course of things in general. We gave up note- 
books in a week. Our business was not to cram 



208 LOWELL 

lifeless detail, but to absorb as much as we might 
of the spirit of his exuberant literary vitality. 
And through it all he was always a quiz ; you 
never knew what he was going to do or to say 
next. One whimsical digression I have always 
remembered, chiefly for the amiable atrocity of 
the pun. Some mention of wings had been made 
in the text, whereupon Mr. Lowell observed that 
he had always had a liking for wings : he had 
lately observed that some were being added to the 
ugliest house in Cambridge, and he cherished 
hopes that they might fly away with it. I remem- 
ber, too, how one tremendous passage in the 
' ' Inferno " started him off in a disquisition con- 
cerning canker-worms, and other less mentionable 
— if more diverting — vermin. And then, all of a 
sudden, he soared up into the clouds, and pounced 
down on the text again, and asked the next man 
to translate. You could not always be sure when 
he was in earnest ; but there was never a moment 
when he let you forget that you were a human be- 
ing in a human world, and that Dante had been 
one, too. One or two of us, among ourselves, 
nicknamed him "sweet wag;" I like the name 
still. 

After a month or two, he found that we were 
not advancing fast enough. So he fell into a way 
of making us read one canto to him, and then 
reading the next to us. If we wished to interrupt 
him, we were as free to do so as he was to inter- 



LOWELL 209 

rupt us. There was one man in the class, I re- 
member, who liked to read out-of-the-way books, 
and who used to break in on Mr. Lowell's trans- 
lation with questions about Gabriel Harvey and 
other such worthies, rather humorously copying 
Mr. Lowell's own irrelevancies ; but he could 
never get hold of anything so out of the way that 
Mr. Lowell had not read it, or at least could not 
talk about it as easily as if he had read it often. 
So, in a single college year, we read through the 
Divine Comedy, and the Vita Nuova ; and dipped 
into the Convito and the lesser writings of Dante. 
And more than one of us learned to love them al- 
ways. 

Ill 

This class-room work, however, was to some of 
us the least important part of Mr. Lowell's teach- 
ing. Almost as soon as the year began, he an- 
nounced that he should always be at home one 
evening in the week, and glad to see us. Several 
of us took him at his word, and even took his 
word to signify more than the good man ever 
meant it to. For if the evening he set aside for 
us proved inconvenient, we made no scruple of 
going to Elmwood at other times; and if Mr. 
Lowell was at home — as he generally was in those 
years— we were always admitted. 

It is those evenings with him in his library that 
one remembers best. There was always a wood- 
14 



210 LOWELL 

fire burning above a bed of ashes which had been 
accumulating for years. He would generally sit at 
one side of the fire, within easy reach of the tongs, 
which he often plied as he talked. What is more, 
when some of us grew more familiar and ventured 
to ply the tongs ourselves, he would not interfere. 
He would always be rather carelessly dressed : a 
loose smoking-jacket, I think, and often slippers. 
And he would smoke a pipe. He would generally 
begin the evening by offering one a cigar. My 
impression, I remember, was that the cigar was 
always the same, and for some months I did not 
dare accept it. Finally, I summoned courage to 
smoke it, and found it very dry and the wrapper 
cracked; which went far to confirm my impres- 
sion. But one did not care about that sort of 
thing. His pipe fairly started, Mr. Lowell would 
begin to talk, in his own quizzical way — at one 
moment beautifully in earnest, at the next so 
whimsical that you could not quite make out what 
he meant — about whatever came into his head. 
It might be what he had just been reading ; he 
had generally just been reading some bit of old 
literature — once I remember finding him deep in 
a narrative in the Apocrypha, which he went on 
reading aloud. It might be the news of the day, 
it might be reminiscence of any kind. All we 
had to do was to sit and listen, which was far bet- 
ter than any other way of spending an evening 
known to me in those davs. To talk to him was 



LOWELL 211 

hard. A man to whom people have liked to lis- 
ten these thirty years rarely remains a good list- 
ener to things like undergraduate chatter, which 
are not worth serious attention. But when he did 
listen, and when he talked, too, he did so — no 
matter how quizzically — with a certain politeness 
that at the time seemed to me, and in memory re- 
mains, a typical example of the signification of 
the word urbane,' and all this in smoking- jacket 
and slippers, by lamp-light, before a flickering 
wood-fire whose ashes were crumbling down into a 
great bed which had grown from hundreds of such 
fires before. 

The human friendliness of those evenings, who- 
ever knew them cannot forget. To some of us it 
gave a new meaning to everything he touched, in 
teaching or in talk. Here was a man who faced 
great things and little undismayed; who found 
in literature not something gravely mysterious, 
but only the best record that human beings have 
made of human life ; who found, too, in human 
life — old and new T — not something to be disdained 
w 7 ith the serene contempt of smug scholarship, 
but the everlasting material from which literature 
and art are made. Here was a man, you grew to 
feel, who knew literature, and knew the world, 
and knew you, too ; ready and willing, in a 
friendly way, to speak the word of cordial intro- 
duction. There came from those evenings a cer- 
tain feeling of personal affection for him, very 



212 LOWELL 

rare in any student's experience of even the most 
faithful teacher. 

Yet, faithful as his work was in spirit, he hated 
the details of it, and sometimes treated them with 
a whimsical disregard that whoever did not ap- 
preciate how thoroughly it put them where they 
belonged might have deemed cynically indiffer- 
ent. I remember an example of this in connec- 
tion with an examination — I believe the first he 
gave us. There are few things less favourable to 
literary culture than written examinations ; they 
are almost unmitigated, if quite necessary, evils. 
Perhaps from unwillingness to degrade the text 
of Dante to such use, Mr. Lowell set us, when we 
had read the Inferno and part of the Purgatorio, 
a paper consisting of nothing but a long passage 
from Massimo d* Azeglio, which we had three 
hours to translate. This task we performed as 
best we might. Weeks passed, and no news came 
of our marks. At last one of the class, who was 
not quite at ease concerning his academic stand- 
ing, ventured, at the close of a recitation, to ask 
if Mr. Lowell had assigned him a mark. Mr. 
Lowell looked at the youth very gravely, and in- 
quired what he really thought his work deserved. 
The student rather diffidently said that he hoped 
it was worth sixty per cent. " You may take it," 
said Mr. Lowell ; " and I shan't have the bother 
of reading your book." 

I remember two or three instances of the curi- 



LOWELL 213 

ous friendliness which by and by sprang up be- 
tween him and his pupils. At that time the stu- 
dents were publishing a paper which contained 
likenesses of the faculty, imitated — at the longest 
of intervals — from Vanity Fair. When a por- 
trait of Mr. Lowell appeared, with his sack-coat, 
and his silk hat, and his heavy boots all duly em- 
phasised, somebody ventured to ask him how he 
liked it. To which he replied that he had been 
grieved to observe that the artist had allowed a 
handkerchief to protrude from his breast-pocket ; 
but had been consoled by the fact that the artist 
had kindly permitted him to wear plaid trousers 
—an innocent fancy of his to which Mrs. Lowell 
strongly objected. 

Another, very different, example of his way of 
treating us appeared one evening, when I went 
alone to call at Elmwood, and found him alone in 
his library. I had never seen him so stern in as- 
pect, so absent in manner. In a moment he told 
me why. He had just heard of the death of a 
dear friend. Of course I rose to go, but he de- 
tained me; it would do him good, he said, to 
talk. I have always wished that I had written 
down what I remembered of the talk that fol- 
lowed, for it still seems to me that I have never 
heard another so memorable ; but all that re- 
mains with me now is the very beginning. 
There is one blessed comfort, he said, that comes 
with death ; then, at lastj we c&n begin 5 with cer- 



214: LOWELL 

tainty of no awaking disenchantment, to idealise 
those we love. It is the dead, unbodied Beatrice 
who lives for ever in the lines of Dante. We can 
watch among our friends the growth of their own 
Beatrices that such as have had the happiness to 
know them make amid the agonies of bereave- 
ment, each for himself -. This friend of his own, 
just dead, was already gathering to herself the un- 
mixed glories of the ideality which would gather 
about her as long as those who loved her should 
live to know it. — And so he talked on, rambling 
far and wide, not forgetting now and then the 
whimsicality without which his talk would not 
have been hiSj nor ever forgetting either the deep 
gravity of the mood in which I had found him. 
That talk was such a poem as I have never read. 
When at last I left him, he took my hand more 
warmly than ever before. It had done him good, 
that silent greeting said, to talk, to have any 
listener. 

The feeling of personal regard which came from 
such intercourse as this was different from any- 
thing else I knew as a student. You felt, at last, 
in spite of all his quizzical whimsicality, a sen- 
timent of intimacy, of confidence, of familiarity 
which no one else excited. You felt instinctively 
that such a feeling must be mutual. Mr. Lowell 
was a celebrated man, of course ; a serious figure 
in American literature. But at that moment, 
though he was still in the full vigour of life, his 



LOWELL 215 

work seemed pretty well over* You thought of 
him as a kind old friend, resting contemplatively 
before his wood-fire, thinking and talking of all 
manner of human things ; and waiting, very 
serenely, in sack-coat and slippers, for the far-off 
end of an ideal life of letters. It was just at the 
end of my second year of study with him — a year 
in which he had taught me almost as much over 
the text of Eoland and other dreary old French 
poems as he had taught over Dante himself — 
that the news came that he was going to Spain. 

IV 

I heard it, I think, on our Class-Day. The 
class had distinguished itself by an internal 
squabble which had prevented the election of 
Class-Day officers, and consequently the usual 
oration and poem, and so on. By way of peace- 
making, perhaps, Mr. Lowell had invited us all 
to an open-air breakfast at Elmwood, at the hour 
when formal ceremonies usually make the begin- 
ning of Class-Day at Harvard so remote fr^m 
amusing. Pew of the men knew him, even by 
sight; but all found him so cordial a host that 
for the moment our animosities were half for- 
gotten. I asked him if the report of his mission 
were true ; and he said it was. I remember won- 
dering how this friendly, careless, whimsical, hu- 
man man of letters, who had seemed so perma- 



216 LOWELL 

nently settled in his arm-chair, would manage the 
rather serious business of diplomatic life ; won- 
dering, with true boyish impudence, whether he 
would be up to it. After that day I did not see 
him until his final return from the mission to 
England. 

All the time I had felt as if such intimate per- 
sonal feeling as he had aroused and permitted 
must have been mutual. When at last I met him 
again, it was a slight shock to find that he had 
quite forgotten my face, and almost forgotten 
my name. The truth was, I began at last to see, 
that throughout those old days he had known 
better than any of us what dull, fruitless beings 
we college boys were ; but that his business 
had been to teach us all he could, and he had 
known that he, at least, could teach best by show- 
ing himself to us as he was. All this kindness, 
all this friendliness, all this humanity was real ; 
all the culture he had striven to impart to us was 
as precious as we had ever thought it. We our- 
selves, though, were mere passing figures, not 
worth very serious personal memory; and Mr. 
Lowell valued people at their true worth, and was 
beautifully free from that clerical kind of humbug 
which presses your hand after an interval of years, 
and asks feelingly for the dear children it has 
never bothered its wits about. And the fact that 
all he had been to us and all he had done for us 
had been his honest, earnest work as a teacher, 



LOWELL 217 

and not his spontaneous conduct as a human be- 
ing, makes it seem now all the more admirable. 
I have often shuddered to think how we must 
have bored him ; I have never ceased more and 
more to admire the faithful persistency with 
which he inspired us. 

The last time I spoke to him was on his seven- 
tieth birthday. A public dinner had been given 
him, and in the speeches his public life and 
works had been rehearsed from beginning to end ; 
but not a word had been said of his teaching. 
After dinner I told him that this omission had 
meant much to me, that to me he would always 
be chiefly the most inspiring teacher I had ever 
had. His face lighted with the old quizzical 
smile, and I could not tell quite how much he 
was in earnest when, with all the old urbanity, he 
answered : " I'm glad you said that. I've been 
wondering if I hadn't wasted half my life." 



' »»»»»»>? LIST OF VOLUMES OF 
ESSAYS ON LITERATURE, ART, 
MUSIC, ETC., PUBLISHED BY 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 743-745 
BROAD WA Y, NE W YORK.f $tf&<<&<$<<% 

HENRY ADAMS. 

Historical Essays. (i2mo, $2.00.) 

Contents : Primitive Rights of Women — Captaine John 
Smith — Harvard College, 1 786-1 787 — Napoleon I. at 
St. Domingo — The Bank of England Restriction — The 
Declaration of Paris, 1861 — The Legal Tender Act — The 
New York Gold Conspiracy — The Session, 1869- 1870. 

" Mr. Adams is thorough in research, exact in statement, 
judicial in tone, broad of view, picturesque and impressive in 
description, nervous and expressive in style. His character- 
izations are terse, pointed, clear." — New York Tribune. 

SIR EDWIN ARNOLD. 

Japonica. Illustrated by Robert Blum. (Large 
8vo ; $3.00.) 

"Artistic and handsome. In theme, style, illustrations and 
manufacture, it will appeal to every refined taste, presenting a 
most thoughtful and graceful study of the fascinating people among 
whom the author spent a year." — Cincinnati Enquirer. 

AUGUSTINE BIRRELL. 

Obiter Dicta, First Series. (i6mo, $1.00.) 

Contents : Carlyle — On the Alleged Obscurity of Mr, 
Browning's Poetry — Truth Hunting — Actors — A Rogue^ 
Memoirs — The Via Media — Falstaff. 

" Some admirably written essays, amusing and brilliant. The 
book is the book of a highly cultivated man, with a real gift of 
expression, a good deal of humor, a happy fancy." — Spectator. 

Obiter Dicta, Second Series. (i6mo, $1.00.) 

Contents : Milton — Pope — Johnson — Burke — The Muse 
of History — Lamb — Emerson — The Office of Literature — 
Worn Out Types — Cambridge and the Poets — Book-buying. 

"Neat, apposite, clever, full of quaint allusions, happy 
thoughts, and apt, unfamiliar quotations." — Boston Advertiser. 



2 SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. 

Res Judicata: Papers and Essays. (i6mo, 
$1.00.) 

" Whether Mr. Birrell writes of Richardson or Barrow, Gibbon 
or Newman, he shows himself equally intelligent and appreciative. 
His wit and audacity are backed by sterling sense and fine taste." 

— Chicago Tribune. 

Prof. H. H. BOYESEN. 

Essays on German Literature. (i2mo, 
$1.50.) 

"Prof. Boyesen is cultivated without being pedantic, and 
serious without being dull. The literature he analyzes and ex- 
pounds is the literature that has international value." 

— Boston Beacon, 

W. C. BROWNELL. 

French Traits. (i2mo, $1.50.) 

Contents : The Social Instinct — Morality — Intelligence 
— Sense and Sentiment — Manners— Women — The Art In- 
stinct — The Provincial Spirit — Democracy — New York after 
Paris. 

" These chapters form a volume of criticism which is sympa- 
thetic, intelligent, acute, and contains a great amount of whole- 
some suggestion." — Boston Advertiser. 

French Art. (121110, $1.25.) 

" Brought to the judgment in this cool and scientific spirit, the 
whole course of French painting and sculpture, as shown by the 
masters pre-eminent in each era, is reviewed by a critic as certain 
of his criticisms as he is capable in forming them." 

-—Springfield Republican. 

THOMAS CARLYLE. 

Lectures on the History of Literature. 
(Now printed for the first time. 12010, $1.00.) 

Summary of Contents: Literature in General — Language, 
Tradition — The Greeks — The Heroic Ages — Horner — /Es- 
chylusto Socrates — The Romans — Middle Ages — Christianity 
— The Crusades — Dante — The Spaniards — Chivalry — Cer- 
vantes — The Germans — Luther — The Origin, Work and 
Destiny of the English — Shakespeare — Milton — Swift — Hume 
— Wertherism — The French Revolution — Gcethe and his 
Works. 

" Every intelligent American reader will instantly wish to read 
this book through, and many will say that it is the clearest and 
wisest and most genuine book that Carlyle ever produced. We 
could have no work from his hand which embodies more clearly 
and emphatically his literary opinions than his rapid and graphic 
survey of the great writers and great literary epochs of the world/' 

—Boston Herald. 



SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESS A YS % 3 

ALICE MORSE EARLE. 

The Sabbath in Puritan New England. 
(i2mo, $1.25.) 

"She writes with a keen sense of humor, and out of the full 
stores of adequate knowledge and plentiful explorations among old 
pamphlets, letters, sermons, and that treasury, not yet run dry in 
New England, family traditions. The book is as sympathetic as 
it is bright and humorous." — The Independent. 

China Collecting in America. (With 75 
illustrations. Sq. 8vo, $3.00.) 

11 Her book is full of entertainment, not only for the china 
hunter and collector, but for all who are interested in early times 
and manufactures, in the old houses and country people, in the 
history of America, and the habits and customs of the past." 

— New York Observer. 

Customs and Fashions in Old New England. 
(i2mo, $1.25.) 

Mrs. Earle describes the daily life and habits, the festivals, 
larder, taverns, modes of travel, peculiarities of courtship, 
marriages, funerals, the utensils and furniture of the Puritan 
farm and home, with the same wit, sympathetic feeling, and 
copious information so marked in her former works. 

HENRY T. FINCK. 

Chopin, and Other Musical Essays. (i2mo, 
$1.50.) 

44 Written from abundant knowledge ; enlivened by anecdote 
and touches of enthusiasm, suggestive, stimulating." 

— Boston Post. 

JAMES ANTHONY FROUDE. 

The Spanish Story of the Armada, and 
Other Essays. (i2mo, $1.50.) 

Contents: The Spanish Story of the Armada — Antonio 
Perez: An Unsolved Historical Riddle — Saint Teresa — The 
Templars — The Norway Fjords — Norway Once More. 

Short Studies on Great Subjects. (Half 
leather, i2mo, 4 vols., each $1.50.) 
CONTENTS : 

Vol. 1. The Science of History — Times of Erasmus and 
Luther — The Influence of the Reformation on the Scottish 
Character — The Philosophy of Catholicism — A Plea for the 
Free Discussion of Theological Difficulties — Criticism and the 



4 SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. 

Gospel History — The Book of job — Spinoza — The Dissolu- 
tion of Monasteries — England's Forgotten Worthies — Homer 
— The Lives of the Saints — Representative Man — Reynard 
the Fox — The Cat's Pilgrimage — Fables — Parable of the 
Bread-fruit Tree — Compensation. 

Vol. II. Calvinism — A Bishop of the Twelfth Century 
— Father Newman on "The Grammar of Assent" — Con- 
ditions and Prospects of Protestantism — England and Her 
Colonies — A Fortnight in Kerry— Reciprocal Duties in State 
and Subject — The Merchant and His Wife — On Progress — 
The Colonies Once More — Education — England's War — 
The Eastern Question — Scientific Method Applied to History. 

Vol. III. Annals of an English Abbey — Revival of 
Romanism — Sea Studies — Society in Italy in the Last Days 
of the Roman Republic — Lucian — Divus Caesar — On the 
Uses of a Landed Gentry — Party Politics — Leaves from a 
South African Journal. 

Vol. IV. The Oxford Counter — Reformation — Life and 
Times of Thomas Becket — Origen and Celsus— A Cagliostro 
of the Second Century — Cheneys and the House of Russell 
— A Siding at a Railway Station. 

"All the papers here collected are marked by the qualities 
which have made Mr. Froude the most popular of living 
English historians — by skill in argumentative and rhetorical ex- 
position, by felicities of diction, by contagious earnestness, and by 
the rare power of fusing the results of research in the imagination 
so as to produce a picture of the past at once exact and vivid. ** 

— N. Y. Sun. 



WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE. 

Gleanings of Past Years, 1843- 1879. (7 
vols., i6mo, each $1.00.) 

Contents : Vol. I., The Throne and the Prince Consort. 
The Cabinet and Constitution — Vol. II., Personal and 
Literary — Vol. III., Historical and Speculative — Vol. IV., 
Foreign — Vol. V. and VI., Ecclesiastical — Vol. VII., Miscel- 
laneous. 

"Not only do these essays cover a long period of time, they 
also exhibit a very wide range of intellectual effort. Perhaps their 
most striking feature is the breadth of genuine intellectual sym- 
pathy, of which they afford such abundant evidence." — Nation. 



SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. 5 

ROBERT GRANT. 

The Reflections of a Married Man. (i2mo, 
cloth, $1.00; paper, 50 cents.) 

"Nothing is more entertaining than to have one's familiar ex- 
periences take objective form; and few experiences are more fami- 
liar than those which Mr. Grant here chronicles for us. Altogether 
Mr. Grant has given us a capital little book, which should easily 
strike up literary comradeship with 'The Reveries of a Bache- 
lor.' " — Boston Transcript. 

Opinions of a Philosopher. (Illustrated by 
Reinhart and Smedley. i2mo, cloth, $1.00.) 

A sequel to the author's " Reflections," relating the ex- 
periences through middle life of Fred and Josephine, with 
equal charm and humor. 

E. J. HARDY. 

The Business of Life: A Book for Everyone. 
— How To Be Happy Though Married: Being 
a Handbook to Marriage — The Five Talents 
of Woman : A Book for Girls and Women — 
Manners Makyth Man — The Sunny Days of 
Youth: A Book for Boys and Young Men. 
(i2mo, each $1.25.) 

" The author has a large store of apposite quotations and anec- 
dotes from which he draws with a lavish hand, and he has the art 
of brightening his pages with a constant play of humor that makes 
what he says uniformly entertaining.'* — Boston Advertiser. 

W. E. HENLEY. 

Views and Reviews. Essays in Appreciation : 
Literature. (i2mo, $1.00.) 

Contents : Dickens — Thackeray — Disraeli — Dumas — 
Meredith — Byron — Hugo — Heine — Arnold — Rabelais — 
Shakespeare — Sidney — Walton — Banville — Berlioz — Long- 
fellow — Balzac — Hood — Lever — Congreve — TolstoT — Field- 
ing, etc., etc. 

"Interesting, original, keen and felicitous. His criticism will be 
found suggestive, cultivated, independent.'* — N. Y. Tribune. 



6 SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. 

J. G. HOLLAND. 

Titcomb's Letters to Young People, Single 
and Married — Gold-Foil, Hammered from 
Popular Proverbs — Lessons in Life: A Series 
of - Familiar Essays — Concerning the Jones 
Family — Plain Talks on Familiar Subiects — 
Every-Day Topics, First Series, Second Series. 
(Small i2mo, each, $1.25.) 

"Dr. Holland will always find a congenial audience in the 
homes of culture and refinement. He does not affect the play of 
the darker and fiercer passions, but delights in the sweet images 
that cluster around the domestic hearth. He cherishes a strong 
fellow-feeling with the pure and tranquil life in the modest social 
circles of the American people, and has thus won his way to the 
companionship of many friendly hearts." — N, V, Tribune, 

WILLIAM RALPH INGE. 

Society in Rome under the C/esars. (i2mo, 
$1.25.) 

" Every page is brimful of interest. The picture of life in Rome 
under the Csesars are graphic and thoroughly intelligible/' 

— Chicago Herald. 

ANDREW LANG. 

Essays in Little. (Portrait, ismo, $1.00.) 

Contents : Alexandre Dumas — Mr. Stevenson's Works 
— Thomas Haynes Bayly — Theodore de Banville — Homer 
and the Study of Greek — The Last Fashionable Novel — 
Thackeray — Dickens — Adventures of Buccaneers — The Sagas 
— Kingsley — Lever — Poems of Sir Walter Scott — Bunyan — 
Letter to a Young Journalist — Kipling's Stories. 

"One of the most entertaining and bracing of books. It ought 
to win every vote and please every class of readers." 

— Spectator (London). 

Letters to Dead Authors. (i6mo, $1.00. 
Cameo Edition, with etched portrait and four 
new letters, $1.25.) 

Letters to Thackeray — Dickens — Herodotus — Pope — 
Rabelais — Jane Austen — Isaak Walton — Dumas — Theocritus 
— Pope — Scott — Shelley — Moliere — Burns, etc., etc. 

"The book is one of the luxuries of the literary taste. It is 
meant for the exquisite palate, and is prepared by one of the 
' knowing ' kind. It is an astonishing little volume." 

— N. Y. Evening Post. 



SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSA VS. 7 

SIDNEY LANIER. 

The English Novel and the Principle of 
its Development. (Crown 8vo, $2.00.) 

" The critical and analytical portions of his work are always in 
high key, suggestive, brilliant, rather dogmatic and not free from 
caprice. . . But when all these abatements are made, the 
lectures remain lofty in tone and full of original inspiration." 

— Independent. 

The Science of English Verse. (Crown 8vo, 
$2.00.) 

"It contains much sound practical advice to the makers of 
verse. The work shows extensive reading and a refined taste 
both in poetry and in music." — Nation. 

EDWARD SANDFORD MARTIN. 

Windfalls of Observation. Gathered for 
the Edification of the Young and the Solace of 
Others. (i2mo, $1.25.) 

A collection of brief essays on topics of perennial interest, 
personal in quality, literary in treatment, shrewd, and dryly 
humorous, having a decided " Roundabout," though 
thoroughly American, flavor. 

BRANDER MATTHEWS. 

French Dramatists of the 19TH Century. 
(New Edition, 8vo, $1.50.) 

Contents : Chronology — The Romantic Movement — 
Hugo — Dumas — Scribe — Augier — Dumas fits — Sardou — 
Feuillet — Labiche — Meilhac and Halevy — Zola and the 
Tendencies of French Drama — A Ten Years' Retrospect : 
1881-1891. 

" Mr. Matthews writes with authority of the French Stage. 
Probably no other writer of English has a larger acquaintance 
with the subject than he. His style is easy and graceful, and the 
book is delightful reading." — N. Y, Times. 

The Theatres of Paris. (Illustrated. i6mo, 
$1.25.) 

" An interesting, gossipy, yet instructive little book." 

—Academy (London). 



8 SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS, 

DONALD G. MITCHELL. 

English Lands, Letters and Kings. Vol. I., 
From Celt to Tudor. Vol. II., From Elizabeth 
to Anne. (i2mo, each $1.50.) 

'* Crisp, sparkling, delicate, these brief talks about authors, 
great and small, about kings and queens, schoolmasters and 
people, whet the taste for more. In ' Ik Marvel's ' racy, sweet, 
delightful prose, we seethe benefits of English literature assimi- 
lated. " — Literary World. 

Reveries of a Bachelor; or, A Book of the 
Heart — Dream Life: A Fable of the Seasons. 
(Cameo Edition, with etching, i6mo, each 
$1.25.) 

" Beautiful examples of the art (of book making). The vein of 
sentiment in the text is one of which youth never tires." 

— The Nation. 

Seven Stories with Basement and Attic — 
Wet Days at Edgewood, with Old Farmers, 
Old Gardeners and Old Pastorals — Bound 
Together, A Sheaf of Papers— Out-of-Town 
Palaces, with Hints for their Improvement — 
My Farm of Edgewood, A Country Book. 
(i2mo, each $1.25.) 

" No American writer since the days of Washington Irving uses 
the English language as does ' Ik Marvel.' His books are as 
natural as spring flowers, and as refreshing as summer rains." 

— Boston Transcript. 

GEORGE MOORE. 

Impressions and Opinions. (i2mo, $1.25.) 

" Both instructive and entertaining . . . still more interest- 
ing is the problem of an English Theatre Libre, of which Mr. 
Moore is an ingenious advocate. The four concluding essays, 
which treat of art and artists, are all excellent.'" 

— Saturday Review (London.) 

Modern Painting. (i2mo, $2.00.) 

The courage, independence, originality, and raciness with 
which Mr. Moore expressed his opinions on matters relating 
to the stage and to literature in his " Impressions and 
Opinions " are equally characteristic of these essays on art 
topics. 



SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. 9 

E. MAX MULLER. 

Chips from a German Workshop. Vol. I., 
Essays on the Science of Religion — Vol. II., 
Essays on Mythology, Tradition and Customs 
— Vol. III., Essays on Literature, Biographies 
and Antiquities — Vol. IV., Comparative Phi- 
lology, Mythology, etc. — Vol. V., On Free- 
dom, etc. (5 vols., Crown 8vo, each $2.00.) 

" These books afford no end of interesting extracts ; ' chips ' by 
the cord, that are full both to the intellect and the imagination ; 
but we may refer the curious reader to the volumes themselves. 
He will find in them a body of combined entertainment and in- 
struction such as has hardly ever been brought together in so 
compact a form." — N. Y, Evening Post, 

Biographical Essays. (Crown 8vo, $2.00.) 

" Max Miiller is the leading authority of the world in Hindoo 
literature, and his volume on Oriental reformers will be acceptable 
to scholars and literary people of all classes." — Chicago Tribune. 

THOMAS NELSON PAGE. 

The Old South, Essays Social and Poli- 
tical. (i2mo, $1.25.) 

"They afford delightful glimpses of aspects and conditions of 
Southern life which few at the North have ever appreciated fully." 

— Congregationalist . 

AUSTIN PHELPS, D.D. 

My Note-Book : Fragmentary Studies in 
Theology and Subjects Adjacent thereto (i2mo, 
$1.50) — Men and Books ; or, Studies in Homi- 
letics (8vo, $2.00) — My Portfolio (i2mo, 
$1.50)— My Study, and Other Essays (i2mo, 
$1.50). 

" His great and varied learning, his wide outlook, his profound 
sympathy with concrete men and women, the lucidity and beauty 
of his style, and the fertility of his thought, will secure for him a 
place among the great men of American Congregationalism." 

— N. Y. Tribune. 



io SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. 

NOAH PORTER, LL.D. 

Books and Reading. (Crown 8vo, $2.00.) 

"It is distinguished by all the rare acumen, discriminating; 
taste and extensive literary knowledge of the author. The chief 
departments of literature are reviewed in detail."— JV. Y. Times. 

PHILIP SCHAFF, D.D. 

Literature and Poetry. (With portrait. 
8vo, $3.00.) 

"There is a great amount of erudition in the collection, but the 
style is so simple and direct that the reader does not realize that 
he is following the travels of a close scholar through many learned 
volumes in many different languages." — Chautauquan. 

EDMOND SCHERER. 

Essays on English Literature. (With por- 
trait. i2mo, $1.50.) 

" M. Scherer had a number of great qualities, mental and 
moral, which rendered him a critic of English literature, in par- 
ticular, whose views and opinions have not only novelty and 
freshness, but illumination and instruction for English readers, 
accustomed to conventional estimates from the English stand- 
point." — Literary World. 

WILLIAM G. T. SHEDD, D.D. 

Literary Essays. (8vo, $2.50.) 

"They bear the marks of the author's scholarship, dignity and 
polish of style, and profound and severe convictions of truth and 
righteousness as the basis of culture as well as character." 

— Chicago Interior. 

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. 

Across the Plains, with Other Essays and 
Memories. (i2mo, $1.25.) 

Contents : Across the Plains : Leaves from the Note- 
book of an Emigrant between New York and San Francisco 
— The Old Pacific Capital — Fontainebleau : Village Com- 
munities of Painters — Epilogue to an Inland Voyage — Con- 
tribution to the History of Life — Education of an Engineer — 
The Lantern Bearers— Dreams— Beggars — Letter to a Young 
Man Proposing to Embrace a Literary Life — A Christmas 
Sermon. 



SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. n 

Memories and Portraits. (i2mo, $1.00.) 

Contents : Some College iMemories — A College Magazine 
— An Old Scotch Gardener — Memoirs of an Islet — Thomas 
Stevenson — Talk and Talkers — The Character of Dogs — A 
Gossip on a Novel of Dumas — A Gossip on Romance — A 
Humble Remonstrance. 

Virginibus Puerisque, and Other Papers. 
(i2mo, $1.00 ; Cameo Edition, with etched 
portrait, $1.25.) 

Familiar Studies of Men and Books. (i2mo, 
$1.25.) 

" If there are among our readers any lovers of good books to 
whom Mr. Stevenson is still a stranger, we may advise them to 
make his acquaintance through either of these collections of essays. 
The papers are full of the rare individual charm which gives a 
distinction to the lightest products of his art and fancy. He is a 
notable writer of good English, who combines in a manner 
altogether his own the flexibility, freedom, quickness and sug- 
gestiveness of contemporary fashions with a grace, dignity, and 
high-breeding that belong rather to the past." — N. V. Tribune. 

CHARLES W. STODDARD. 

South Sea Idyls. (i2mo, $1.50.) 

" Neither Loti nor Stevenson has expressed from tropical life 
the luscious, fruity delicacy, or the rich, wine-like bouquet of these 
sketches." — The Independent. 

RICHARD HENRY STODDARD. 

Under the Evening Lamp. (i2mo, $1.25.) 

" A very charming volume of gossipy criticism on such poets 
as Burns, Motherwell and Hartley Coleridge." — Public Opinion, 

HENRY VAN DYKE, D.D. 

The Poetry of Tennyson. {New and en- 
larged Edition, with portrait. i2mo, $2.00.) 

Contents : Tennyson's First Flight — The Palace of Art : 
Milton and Tennyson — Two Splendid Failures — The Idylls 
of the King— The Historic Triology — The Bible in Tennyson 



12 SELECTED VOLUMES OF ESSAYS. 

— Fruit from an Old Tree — On the Study of Tennyson — 
Chronology — List of Biblical Quotations. 

"The two new chapters and the additional chronological mat- 
ter have greatly enriched the work." — T. B. Aldrich. 

JOHN C. VAN DYKE. 

Art for Art's Sake. (With 24 illustrations. 
i2mo, $1.50.) 

"The clear setting forth of the facts and theories of painting 
has its advantages in these days when there is so much art analysis 
that nobody can understand. This essayist deals with the subtle- 
ties, but in so doing he illuminates them. Moreover he is very 
interesting. His book 'reads itself,' as the phrase is." 

— New York Sun. 

BARRETT WENDELL. 

Stelligeri, and Other Essays Concerning 
America. (i2mo, $1.25.) 

A series of interesting and suggestive papers on historical 
and literary themes, thoroughly American in spirit. 

WOODROW WILSON. 

An Old Master, and Other Political Es- 
says. (i2mo, $1.00.) 

These essays, revealing a fine literary taste, deal in a very 
human and popular way with some important political prob- 
lems. 



j®iSIP THE FOREGOING VOLUMES OF 
ESSAYS ARE FOR SALE BY ALL BOOKSELLERS, OR 
WILL BE SENT POSTPAID, ON RECEIPT OF PRICE, 
BY THE PUBLISHERS, CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS, 
743-745 BROAD WA Y, NEW YORK'^^^^ 











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